Creating a healing and sacred space can take many forms. For one person it might be a miniature village with model trains. For another it might be a swing among favorite scented plants. It can be filled with personal art and sculpture or a Zen garden, filled with simplicity. traditional and empty.The form will change for each person because it’s not about the form, but about the way WE feel about the form. A man who dreamed of having wonderful model trains as a child but was pushed by circumstances into quickly taking heavy responsibilities at a young age that precluded play, may find it enormously healing (balance and wholeness) to build an amazing model train set through a miniature garden. Another man, constantly forced to examine details at work that go against the strong broad sweeps of quick decisions that come naturally would find anything miniature in his recreational life frustrating. A tennis court or forgetting the garden altogether and going to the beach might be more healing. Healing is not something that can be boxed into somber or “spiritual” stereotypes. It often has a lot to do with FUN, and sometimes the most fun garden is one you don’t have to think about, spend money on or maintain.There are many ways a garden can be healing. One is through associative memories. For example, the first flower I remember growing up was a GORGEOUS grouping of purple peonies. When I saw a five gallon pot of Peonies the other day it brought a smile to my face so I bought it. This is why a healing garden is so personal. It’s not about looking up what is a “healing plant” in some book. Our specific positive memories are a valuable resource to integrate into our garden because things that activate those memories will affect us more powerfully than things that have no memory attached.A healing garden can either be own clearly defined areas within a larger garden or can be the entire garden. This applies not only to healing gardens but to any paradigm. The front garden might be dedicated to pleasing the neighbors, the back lawn and surrounding beds to pleasing a partner and kids, and the far back left garden to being a wildlife preserve, while the far back right garden is your personal healing garden.If healing for you is about deepening your connection to god (your definition for whatever is more than humanity and sacred), then working either with tradition or your personal intuition can bring another level to your healing garden. There are many ways of doing this on a practical level. Symbols can be chalked, painted, sand-blasted or carved into stone, glass or arranged in pebbles. Stain glass, vertical or horizontal, can be incorporated. I’ve always found crystals to be particularly beautiful visually and emotionally and have developed a variety of ways to bring those into a garden setting. You can look at some of my sculptures if you are drawn to crystals in the “Sacred Spaces” portion of www.MysticalLandscapes.com (I called the company that even though 90% of my work is traditional landscaping to alert people that a garden can also at times be mystical).This text is an excerpt from:
Successfully Landscaping Your Marin Home,
Available on Amazon and Marin Bookstores,
By: Dane E. Rose
(415) 455 9161
For pictures of Marin Healing Garden click HERE.
Marin Healing Garden
Mystical Landscapes is a Marin Design and Build
company for all aspects of landscaping.
We also do landscape design Mill Valley, installation and landscape design Corte Madera, installation and landscape design San Rafael, installation and landscape design Novato, installation and landscape design Larkspur, installation and landscape design San Anselmo, and installation and landscape design Tiburon. Marin Landscape Contractor and Marin Landscape Architect.
