Gardening Contemplations

In our quest to find a place for quiet reflection, Gardening Contemplations is one of a series of simple but beautifully curated books on the wonders of the natural world. Providing a place for rest, contemplation and reflection, this book features a selection of quotes, extracts and poetry on the joys of gardening.

This is a perfect bedside book for the literate gardener and makes a terrific gardener's gift book. It is an entertaining survey of 80 plant genera, with a multitude of references to, and extracts from, myth and literature from Shakespeare to the Victorian language of flowers. Based on prodigious research, it includes much literature that has fallen into undeserved obscurity, as well as selections from the great poets. It is a delightful study of the influence of the world's flora on humanity, from the mundane to the mystical. This book is only available through print on demand. All interior art is black and white.

A revolutionary approach to garden design puts plants at the center of a landscape, rather than hardscape features, demonstrating how to work more effectively and confidently with different kinds of plants, explaining how to integrate plantsmanship and design, and furnishing extensive lists of plants suitable for specific purposes and sites.

This lyrical primer on the spirituality of gardening reflects on the relationship between a gardener and his or her garden. Meditating upon how interaction with the earth opens the heart, schools the mind, engages the body, and embraces the soul in a world of increasing detachment from the natural realm, this book affirms a garden as a soulful space where people can take root and experience the changing seasons and the enduring cycle of renewal. Filled with the joy of living, this enchanting spiritual guide will speak to those who yearn to find the holy in the place they call home.

An illustrated guide for turning gardening into opportunities for reflection and meditation. Contemplative Gardening encourages green thumbs to make a connection between tending to the earth and tending to their own souls, between creation care and community growth. From her own checkered history as a gardener, killing houseplants and avoiding yard work to her becoming an avid grower, the author shows transformation can happen. Her own turning point came when she began a church vegetable garden as part of an effort to revitalize a small parish and help it heal from years of division and conflict. A commitment to feeding the hungry was born from the author's reflection and the will to give. With reflections and discussion questions, she suggests that groups can engage and learn from each other. For real gardeners and armchair ones, retreat centers, churches, and seminaries examining agrarian ministries, and readers exploring the intersection of food and faith.

Diploma Thesis from the year 2009 in the subject Landscape Management, grade: Sehr gut, University of Natural Resources and Applied Life Sciences, Vienna, language: English, abstract: Although China cultural as well as political is opening up since about thirty years, the Chinese manner of cerebration, except of few exemptions, has still keep refused most people in the western world. Primarily this has to do with the ancient Chinese ideology self. The Chinese, who are calling their country "The Empire of the Middle", were on principle in the past rarely attempted to leave their nation because the remaining world for them was not really livable. Outside the boundaries, there lived the so called barbarians, who in ancient times mostly were embodied by brutal Mongolian tribes, who martially tried to infiltrate China and from them the Chinese had to protect. So, they created their own world, a world in the world, enclosed by the thousands of meters long Great Wall (Chang Cheng), inside of they felt confident and could develop further. This retirement in an enclosed space and last but not least the retirement in oneself paved finally the way for their private gardens, in which they could undisturbed find an access to a better "world". This essay will deal with these little enclosed garden worlds, these micro-cosmos in a macro-cosmos. This work consists of a searching for their history and the holistically "religious" backgrounds, which first made enable these small but coevally "infinite" universes. It get to the bottom of the correlations between time and space, establish relationships between narrow and open, bright and dark, and last but not least inside and outside, which all are parts of an all-containing, super-ordinate "Great". It makes close connections to landscape paintings and the gardens self, which as major motif threads through the whole text, will find out that they are close correlated to the "Great" and grapple with the centre of the "Whole", with the "Z

When John Alcock replaced the Bermuda grass in his suburban Arizona lawn with gravel, cacti, and fairy dusters, he was doing more than creating desert landscaping. He seeded his property with flowers to entice certain insects and even added a few cowpies to attract termites, creating a personal laboratory for ecological studies. His observations of life in his own front yard provided him with the fieldnotes for this unusual book. In a Desert Garden draws readers into the strange and fascinating world of plants and animals native to Arizona's Sonoran Desert. As Alcock studies the plants in his yard, he shares thoughts on planting, weeding, and pruning that any gardener will appreciate. And when commenting on the mating rituals of spiders and beetles or marveling at the camouflage of grasshoppers and caterpillars, he uses humor and insight to detail the lives of the insects that live in his patch of desert. Celebrating the virtues of even aphids and mosquitoes, Alcock draws the reader into the intricacies of desert life to reveal the complex interactions found in this unique ecosystem. In a Desert Garden combines meticulous science with contemplations of nature and reminds us that a world of wonder lies just outside our own doors.

A collection of essays by some of the most prominent scholars and designers in the field of contemplative landscape design, examining the principles involved in the creation of contemplative spaces, particularly in the West.