Transpersonal gardening is an intentional practice where gardening cultivates psychological and spiritual growth; where the person moves beyond their personal ego to connect with their family heritage, the history of humanity and to Nature itself. Nature, of which we are part. It involves gardening activities and experiences from being in a garden.

 

Transpersonal gardening moves away from the position that the garden is a part of Nature that humans must master for their personal pleasure and profit, to one where we acknowledge that humans are part of Nature. We are biological entities that exist within ecosystems. 

 

The transpersonal gardener approach does not need a theist position where a deity created the rest of Nature and gave it to humans as a gift. Yet it is a spiritual approach that acknowledges something greater in the Universe, just not an anthropocentric deity that separated humans from all other forms of life. 

 

It is possible for someone who holds a theist position to garden transpersonally; however, it is also possible to garden spiritually in a transpersonal way without linking it to a faith path; this is what distinguishes it from many other works written on spiritual gardening that draw on faith paths.

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What is the Transpersonal, and what is gardening?

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Let us take a step back and set out a definition of terms.

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Transpersonal is a term used in philosophy and psychology to denote an experience where the self has awareness and knowledge which goes beyond the everyday self, where the consciousness feels expanded. There is a transcendence of the everyday self. It is associated with peak experiences and spiritual experiences.

 

Gardening involves taking care of a piece of land to grow plants. It is both a science and an art. The focus is on aesthetics and leisure, which, in addition to the scale aspect, distinguishes it from the activity of farming. Gardening may involve the growing of fruit and vegetables for food; however, this is not essential to meet the definition.

 

What follows illustrates transpersonal gardening by setting out some of the lessons from gardening to help personal psychological and spiritual growth.

 

Gardening is an opening for transpersonal experiences

Through guardianship of a piece of ground, the gardener gains a safe introduction to an experience of connecting to something greater than the everyday sense of self, yet just this side of the mystical.

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Gardening can be a way to help connect a person with themselves and with others by a connection to something greater than self, Nature, and one that can have benefits for personal growth.

 

Through reconnecting with Nature, the person can put back together their selfhood, their relationships and their life, with gardening providing a series of metaphors for psychological work, such as digging down, sowing seeds and weeding out. There is the lived experience of seeing plants grow and react to their surroundings.

 

We learn transpersonal messages through gardening: the tending of a garden in the moment, in a season, over the years, makes us think of time and change. You plant, you grow, and you have to commit to taking care of it for a time. Then there are the rituals of gardening, such as composing and renewal, that demonstrate the cycles of life and death.

 

An outgrowth of spiritual awareness can develop from an understanding of natural forces encountered in gardening. In a garden, a person can create an awareness of the winds, rainfall and the seasons. We can see the soil as a microcosm of the macrocosm of Gaia, with the soil as a mini living ecosystem. Through this, gardening can be a starting point for an interest in ecology and the wider Natural World.

 

Gardens and gardening are a source of metaphor for understanding what it is to be alive, and that to be human is to be part of a process. The seasons are a metaphor for our lives: the emergence of wonderful, complex plants from simple seeds that are then gone parallels the life of every individual.

 

In a garden we see plants at different stages of development co-exist; each has its time and place, and to flower out of season could mean a failure to thrive; what we see in Nature provides a fundamental backdrop and a set of metaphors for how we experience the world and has shaped our thinking, providing us with many terms that now apply in other contexts, such as bud, growth, bloom and wilt.

 

Some of the perennial transpersonal lessons offered by gardening are as follows: You learn the lessons of both the cyclical Nature of things and the transitory Nature of everything; the unfolding of the seasons and their individual beauty are transitory but keep returning. You learn patience, as change is inevitable, to appreciate the moment and not to fight Nature but to work with it. At the same time, you learn the need to seize the day: you have to make the most of this September, for this September is the only one you will have this year.

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We are made aware of mortality: you tend the garden each season, but one season you shall not be there. Someone else will tend your garden, or it will become overgrown and cease to be. As the Greek proverb goes, ‘A society grows great when old men [sic] plant trees they know they will never sit under.’

 

You learn what it is to care for another living thing; this residing thing depends upon you. Care involves choices and commitment: when growing in tubs rather than open ground, you are committing to water if you want the plant to thrive. You have to consider what to care for and what not. You learn that Nature does not waste. Gardening teaches about connections. Close observation of a garden reveals the interdependence of all things: as ants devour a slug, it is also full of cooperation, as a bee polinates a plant.

 

Gardening transpersonally offers three types of connections that extend beyond the daily experiences of self.

 

1 An awakening to the connection with Nature of which we are part through the cultivation and tending of plants.

 

2 A connection to our immediate family heritage, whether through gardening or cooking with the produce, is a transgenerational connection.

 

3 A connection to our species' activity of tending to plants dates back to when we transitioned from hunter-gatherers to simple farmers.

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Gardening teaches us about the difference between doing and being

 

Gardening involves lots of activity, the body in motion; there are always jobs to do. The prospective memory could be full of future-oriented plans, including what comes next and what happens afterwards; This teaches us about the state of action, which often yields immediate, tangible results that can be rewarding.  We experience both joy and a sense of mastery. It is about exercise and the burning of calories.  It is about the mobilisation of the body. It is about experiencing embodiment in what often can be an intense way.

 

However, the garden is also a place where one can sit and reflect or be present in the moment. You can be. In the transition between doing and being, you can focus on the differences in your body and mind in the two states. 

 

When not working in the garden, you can either reflect on your activities that day or consider the progress made over the seasons that have passed so far. You can reflect on other years in the garden if you have lived there long enough, and you can reflect on other gardens that you have been in. Consider how the garden might evolve in the future, either through your work or the contributions of future generations. This reflection is a form of mental doing and not just being. In contrast, you can enter a state of focus on present moment awareness.

 

In the garden, with present moment awareness, you focus on the present moment and what you are experiencing, rather than thinking about what has gone or what is to come. What you can see, what you can hear, what you can smell, what you can feel.  If you have fruit from the garden, you can taste it.

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Mindfulness opportunities

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Mindfulness is a practice that helps individuals stay focused in the present moment. It involves a shift in consciousness from our everyday experience of moving into memories of the past and plans for the future, with associated hopes and fears.

 

Gardening can become a form of mindfulness practice. The mindfulness of tending to a garden through potting on, pricking out, and weeding can keep the gardener present in the moment in these activities, providing a natural mindfulness experience. Gardening can be a way to stay in the present, to move away from preoccupation with the past or worries about the future. However, if we time-travel in our minds to the past and future while gardening, it can provide us with memories of positive experiences and hope for future growth. Painful memories are open to rework as we garden using the perennial philosophy that it embodies.

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Grounding: On your knees

 

Kneeling on the soil to garden can be a form of worship. Swap the kneeling pads of the church for the garden kneeler. It cultivates humility. It is literally grounding. It can also remind us of our mortality. To rest on the warm earth in the late spring or early summer can bring great joy. It is something that can be the same for people across the social strata.  Though weeding can be challenging work and not joyful at times, at the right time, mindfully weeding can be a calming and uplifting experience.

 

It is a common phrase in the applied psychology of therapy to talk of grounding the client, particularly when working with stress or trauma. What can be more grounding than being engaged in an activity connected to the physical earth?

 

Gardening also grounds us by bringing us back to our own bodies. Through growing their own fruit and vegetables, the gardener connects to an awareness of their embodiment; that we are what we eat, and we are organic matter. The gardener connects to an awareness that we as a society have been losing.

  

​To dig or not to dig? That is the question

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Do you dig over the garden at the end of the season, to let the frost in, or do you leave it alone if you are a transpersonal gardener? The traditional approach, at the end of the season, involves digging over the ground to allow frost to kill off bugs, a practice now challenged by the no-dig and leave-alone gardening approach. Both are understandable in a symbolic way.

 

Digging over at the end of the season represents an acknowledgement that something has passed and there is a need to prepare for something new; to open the ground and expose it to the elements, to break the crust of the earth and open and prepare it for what is to come.

 

The no-dig approach acknowledges that the soil is an ecosystem, and so to put a spade into it, to break and turn it over, is a destructive act, an act of vandalism. The nuanced relationships that have developed in the top layers of the soil are particularly noteworthy. The action can be symbolic of what humans are doing to the planet. Not digging prioritises the long-term wellbeing of the soil over the quick gain of increased produce in the following year, but ultimately exhausts the soil.

 

A no-dig approach involves adding a layer of compost instead of digging down and turning over. It can be a metaphor for leaving things as they are, but building on them with new material for future growth.

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Lessons in time

 

Gardening teaches you about time and how to manage it. It teaches you about letting go of time awareness and going with the flow. The relationship formed through gardening is a valuable lesson for life in general.

 

In gardening, plants operate on their own internal clocks, timekeepers that measure time by the day length and the temperature of the soil and air. The gardener needs to be aware of these and work with them to help their garden flourish.

 

It is possible to intervene using propagators to bring early health, and lighting to increase day length. But this still acknowledges the time that the plant works on. These artificial interventions are common and do not necessarily mean the gardening is not transpersonal, though obviously, they are doing something unnatural and not working with the seasons as they are.

 

In Britain, until recently, we had had consistent seasons with associated weather patterns. Climate change has affected this. However, within the still present seasonal system, there are tasks related to each season.  The year, in fact, can be broken down to week-by-week tasks (excluding winter). The gardener needs to be aware of these tasks and carry them out for that week in that season. From this, a lesson from life is learnt about the importance of timing our actions to gain the desired result.

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Five senses stimulation

 

Gardens and gardening provide overpowering, stimulating sensory experiences that can have a profound effect on the individual; being in a greenhouse in late spring filled with moist seed trays fills the senses with the smell of forming new life.

 

Being in the garden and gardening offer the opportunity to experience the five senses in a way that can make the person feel embodiment in a sensory organism that is taking in information from around it, which affects their emotions, thoughts and actions. Being in a garden can cause a person to reflect on their sensory experiences in a way that, for most of the day, we are not doing, as we are engaged in activity and living in our heads with the sensory data acted on, without the process of the sensory information being reflected on.  Cooking might be another activity where we reflect on our sensations, noting taste and smell, and visual appearance.

 

The garden offers the opportunity to have a whole sensory experience with all five senses activated:

 

Sight: gardening focuses on the aesthetics, the experience of pleasure from seeing beauty. In addition, sight is used to observe the transition in the garden with the changing of the seasons and from the life cycle of the plant, from seed to decay.

 

Smell: gardens contain a range of scents, particularly but not exclusively those produced by plants. Moving around the garden, the changing scent landscape is experienced. Petrichor is the rare but magical scent that occurs when the rain falls on dry earth. Scents can be powerful prompts for memory. 

 

Touch: The processes of gardening involve the touching of both plants and soil. Plants in the garden offer a range of touch experiences from fluffy flower heads, through smooth leathery leaves, to rough bark. Plants can be chosen to make the garden touch-friendly. There are very few activities other than gardening that involve the placement of hands into the earth and soil. These releases feel-good chemicals in the brain. 

 

Hearing: Gardens offer many different sounds, notably the songs of birds, the buzzing of insects, the wind moving the leaves on the trees and moving tall grass. If there is water in the garden, this can add another attractive feature. By closing your eyes while listening to your surroundings, an ambient landscape can open for you. It proves an excellent place for practising mindfulness.

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Taste: Though the defining feature of gardening does not include growing things to eat. However, the gardener can eat and taste the produce that they have grown themselves. In that case, it is more likely to be of high quality. Found can thus be tasted with a full awareness of its journey from a seed planted by the gardener. The taste is likely to be better than anything shop-bought, as it has freshness, peak ripeness, is without chemical enhancement, and if the gardener has taken care of the soil, mineral density.

  

​​An education in aesthetics

 

Gardens provide an education in aesthetics, offering appreciation on both a micro and macro level: examining a single plant and appreciating a garden as a whole, along with an understanding of the beauty of both.

 

Gardening teaches aesthetics by making the gardener consider what creates a harmonious balance of form, texture, and colour. The principles of balance, proportion and harmony are learnt in either a planned way or in an organic way by responding to how the garden suggests to the gardener how it wants to present itself; what it will offer to the gardener that they will have to respond to by introducing something new to maintain balance, proportion and harmony. The garden poses a question to the gardener: What do you need to do to preserve these principles?  The gardener thinks, intuits, feels and produces the answer, and in the process learns something.  Learning in this way could be considered to be an example of nondual awareness. Though if the gardener overthinks it, their ego becomes involved, and the nonduality is gone.

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Transformation through old recipes

 

The fruit and vegetables from a garden can be transformed into other things. One thing can become many, all good, for example. Rhubarb can become a jam, a crumble, a lemonade and a scone, amongst other things. The transformation occurs through human agency, utilising knowledge passed down through generations, which enables these transformations to occur. Ideas from the minds of people from the distant past, from their learning and experimentation, are passed on either through word of mouth or through the handwritten or printed word. There is a special reverence for recipes passed down through families. If cooking is a form of love, then transgenerational recipes are a form of transgenerational love passed on.

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To share and not to hoard

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Gardening can encourage you to share rather than hoard; to sustain other people after you have enough to meet your own needs. The giving to family, friends, colleagues and even strangers contains the message: I grew this. Still, I have more than I need, so I would like to give it to you rather than it being wasted. The other person may give back. This is an older form of exchange than capitalism.

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That which we call a weed

 

A weed is any plant growing out of place. Though there are certain plants that we often label as weeds, this label is determined by the observer, by humans. Plants that we usually call weeds have common attributes: their resilience, their persistence, that they are well-suited to the conditions in which they are growing, and that they compete with someone else, the gardener, for a different outcome, as they are fighters. We use the word ‘weedy’ to refer to someone weak and poor, but weeds actually are strong and resourceful.

 

Dealing with weeds teaches us to be like them in our resilience and persistence. To keep the weeds back, we need to keep at it. It is not a job that can be ticked off the list as done; it must be repeated to achieve the desired result.

 

We also need to recognise that weeds can be our allies, as they provide valuable food sources for pollinators that help fertilise our fruit and vegetables. They can also be a shield against pests. We need to find space for the weeds and live with them while maintaining clear boundaries where needed, so that our crops are not choked out.

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The tree of life

 

A tree in the garden is a place for contemplation. It reminds us of the other trees of the planet that are vital for our survival. One tree in our garden is symbolic of the global forest.

 

Trees remind us that time can be experienced at different speeds and that life takes on various forms, each living at its own pace. Other forms of living beings have distinct advantages and disadvantages. A migratory bird might travel half around the world and see many places, but its life is brief; a tree is rooted to the spot but may live for a hundred years.

 

Trees, when established, form their own ecosystem where different lifeforms share the space either cooperatively through symbiotic relationships or competitively, most notably as predator and prey, where the continuation of life in one means the cessation of life in the other.

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The green-eyed monster

 

The grass is always greener, or so it seems to the envious gardener. Someone always has a better lawn, a more impressive display of roses, a more bountiful harvest of vegetables. Jealousy in the garden may reach a peak in those who show their vegetables in shows. This negative response needs to be acknowledged and interrupted.  

 

It is normal to experience such thoughts and feelings, but to let them take control of the gardener and guide their future gardening is an unhelpful place to be. Transpersonal gardening is about getting the most out of what you have in your plot as part of a wider community. Other people’s achievements can be inspirational and enjoyed as shared as part of a wider community of people engaged with Nature. 

 

If you can follow this to its full extension, we are all one, and all our gardening successes are shared. Obviously, you cannot just walk into their garden and say this and that, as we are all one; their garden is your garden. We still have the social structures and property law as our context. However, feeling a connection to a greater whole through your actions and being less possessive and striving can help reduce feelings of jealousy and inadequacy in your gardening achievements.

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Dealing with successes and failures

 

Gardening can bring us back down to earth, in a healthy way, by grounding us, bringing us back to an appreciation of the transitory Nature of both glory and suffering.

 

Gardening inspires us with hopes and aspirations for what we would like to achieve each year in the garden. Though Transpersonal gardening is all about collaboration with the rest of the natural world, of which we are part, these ego-related responses are normal and are not to be ashamed of.  If you have any level of passion for gardening, you will have an emotional investment in what happens; the garden's success each year will affect the gardener's emotions. 

 

The Nature of gardening and all the factors involved, particularly due to climate factors, will mean the gardener will experience both successes and failures. The process of gardening teaches the gardener to take a balanced stance on both successes and failures. This perspective can be learned from Kipling's poem "If," which suggests that Triumphs and disasters, as well as impostors, should be treated equally. 

 

At one time, a bed of roses will bloom in an extraordinary way. It is easy to see this as a personal triumph, rather than just relishing the event as a thing without taking too much personal credit. Likewise, a beloved tree that has been cared for for years will suddenly, for no apparent reason, die. It happens. However, it is easy to take this as a personal disaster and failure, when it can be understood as an event that has happened and is part of Nature.

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​Creating gardens for transpersonal experiences

 

Creating gardens that include transpersonal stimulating components is achieved through the creation of a garden as a special sacred space, making our own Utopia, ‘eu topos’ – The good place. Where else can we get regular access to wander around in a safe and bounded space to feel the earth beneath our feet, the elements around us, and the sky above? It enables anyone with a garden to wander around as a nomad in a contained piece of the outside world.

 

So what can we do to increase the transpersonal components of gardening?

Well, what can we learn from a Zen Buddhist monk tending his gravel garden? This tending contains the following features: (1)  mindfulness; (2) lack of clutter; (3) ritual; (4) forms that have symbolic meaning;  and (5) sensory stimulation. These lessons can create a  more transpersonal garden, as follows:

 

 1. Mindfulness – Enhance the mindfulness experiences of gardening and the garden created. Create a sitting, relaxing, and breathing area, and utilise elements like wind and rain to foster more mindful experiences.

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 2. Lack of clutter – Enhance the positive energy of the garden, the Chi, by reducing the clutter in the garden to open up the flow of energy whilst retaining habitats for wildlife, which offer opportunities for transpersonal connections in addition to the sound ecological reasons for doing so.

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3. Ritual – Potting sheds and greenhouses can be places of reflection and areas where the tasks of propagation can be mindfully engaged in.

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4. Introduce forms that have symbolic meaning – The hard landscaping of gardens can develop symbolic messages. For example, paths translate to journey and to discovery.  Walls create boundaries, but they also spark curiosity about what lies on the other side.

 

5. Sensory stimulation – The sensory component of the garden can enhance the transpersonal experience. For example, eating fresh produce, home-grown in the garden, being aware of when it was a seed, when it was a young seedling, and now as a whole fruit. Or leave a fruit to decay and observe the process. Gardens offer the opportunity for people to learn how to use

their sense of smell away from the artificial  smells of the human-made world

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How transpersonal gardening differs from Horticultural therapy

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Transpersonal gardening can be therapeutic for a person. However, it is different from horticultural therapy. Transpersonal gardening aims for personal transformation and to cultivate spiritual experiences, to help the person connect to something greater than the everyday self. Whereas in horticultural therapy the aim is for rehabilitation of physical or psychological for someone who has experienced a decline in their psychological wellbeing. The aim is to restore them to the level of functioning they had prior to the decline.

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In transpersonal gardening we are working in a process orientated way where there is open acceptance that this is co-creation with the garden and it is a reciprocal relationship. We are not in charge, and we work with the agenda that this piece of land appears to want for itself.  Horticultural therapy is traditionally a structured and goal-orientated practice where plants are used as therapeutic ends to help the person recover. Horticultural therapy is great but is not the same as transpersonal gardening.

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A comparison could be made between psychological therapies that people practice and seek help from; in some therapies, such as Cognitive Behaviour Therapy and Dialectic Behaviour Therapy , the person has one or more mental health conditions that they are seeking to have a treatment for, this is closer to horticultural therapy. Whereas there are also therapies, such as transpersonal therapy, person centred therapy, psychodynamic therapy and existential therapy where the person does not necessarily have a condition, but is seeking to develop themselves and grow their potential through the therapy, this is closer to transpersonal gardening.

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In summary (for now), as there is no conclusion

 

Transpersonal gardening is about a process of shared interaction between the gardener, who is part of nature, and their co-creator, the natural world that is outside of them. It is not re-wilding, permaculture, or horticultural therapy as fine as they all are. It may not always be recognisable in the garden, objectively, by someone else that a transpersonal approach has been taken.

 

The transpersonal gardener will have been grounding themselves, reflecting upon time, and having awareness of their senses. They will have felt the aesthetics of the place.

 

They may have gathered produce to eat directly, possibly transformed through recipes, or they may have shared with others what they have grown. They may have noted the qualities of both weeds and trees. They will have noted their experiences of both success and failure, and they will have dealt with jealousy.

 

There may be signs that a transpersonal gardening approach has been taken in the garden itself if the gardener has intentionally developed the garden for transpersonal experiences.

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