The Garden Awakening: Designs to nurture our land and ourselves

could sense the energy of love in those places, but it was conditional love. The land was loved, as long as it stayed contorted in the way the garden designer had decided it should look. It was not allowed to be itself.

Mostly, people stopped growing food themselves less than a hundred years ago. Vegetable gardens were replaced with lawns, which gradually became symbols of status. It was a way of saying to neighbours, "Hey, look at how wealthy we are! We don’t even have to use our land to grow our own food!"

But surely this is better than suffocating the land with concrete and herbaceous borders? That method tends to be fast and convenient, and may be more accepted by our culture and the gardening industry, but it doesn’t encourage an intimate relationship between you and the land – or any connection at all, for that matter.

They were referred to as ‘sacred places’;

Cleared land is like a mirror: it reflects the love and attention it receives from us. Children, in large part, develop their self-image through their interactions with their parents. In the same way, if land receives the message that it is valued only as long as it looks pretty, it will try to contort itself to wear those ill-fitting garments you

If you explore the world of sacred geometry, I guarantee you will be amazed at the beauty and harmony that exists in the shapes and patterns of all things.

If we all sit up and take notice, “believe in fairies” and encourage the life energy to emerge in every piece of land we work with, we can infuse our homes, our families and ourselves with the healing, magical energy of the earth.

In the Islamic tradition, the word ‘garden’ carried a different meaning than it did in the West. In India, Persia and the Arab countries, gardens were actually magnificent rugs, each imbued with specific intentions. They were rolled out so that people could sit on them to meditate and journey to heaven, which was understood to be an inward experien

As above, so below. We are simply a mirror image of each other, the land and us. That connection is deep and mysterious, and only becomes apparent upon close observation and contemplation. We have objectified most of our land; used and abused it. Land is the embodiment of feminine energy, and our treatment of it reflects the way women have become o