How gardening nurtures the Spirit and the sensibilities of Art, Beauty, and Design.

Of all the hobbies one could learn about, gardening is perhaps one of the most satisfying in terms of relaxation, contentment and pure enjoyment. There's a near Zen-like state of mind that enfolds you when you kneel down and put your hands into the earth and manipulate it to help things grow.

The art and beauty of gardening is engendered by the careful arrangement of plantings as to color, scale, and compatibility. Gardening is not necessarily about planting a lot of vegetables in rows, although competent gardeners sometimes incorporate that look into a quilted patchwork. The real beauty of a garden comes from the way it is arranged to incorporate its environment -- using a brick wall, a wooden fence or even a rusted washtub as a background or framework for painting with a brush of floral color.

Some of the most artful and satisfying gardens are achieved by juxtaposing unexpected combinations of color, material, and scale of plantings with unlikely objects or surprising backdrops. On the other hand, many gardens inspire a calm serenity through the use of a well-ordered symmetry, a disciplined design and a continuous program of trimming and pruning for a neat well-tailored appearance.

Gardens also have their practical side. But an herb or vegetable garden grown for its usefulness as a source of nourishment and culinary embellishment can still be created in a more beautiful way through the arrangement of color and texture. Grouping combinations of herbs and vegetables into interestingly shaped plots and using unexpected backdrops can still help an herb garden to manifest as a source of beauty and calmness and serenity.

And if you want to be really practical, you can still plant vegetables in hundreds of ordered rows to facilitate planting and harvesting. There's really nothing wrong with that. It's just that we don't call that a garden, we call it a truck farm.


- Jake