Product Description

Creating a garden that is a spiritual sanctuary — a calm refuge from the stresses of everyday life, a soothing balm for heart and soul — is within every gardener's reach. This book looks at the garden as a place to engage the senses and connect the spirit to nature. Gardens, whether small urban plots or larger country spaces, can become places to foster personal growth and spiritual awareness. Spiritual Gardening in resplendent with illustrations and color photos throughout, illuminating how to create your own special outdoor retreat.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #304598 in Books
• Published on: 2003-09-25
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 190 pages

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
On Creating Sacred Space

We transform our gardens and yards into sacred space when we understand them as places of growth not only for plants and trees but for our inner selves. What is "sacred" space? It is a place of dedication, where the miracles of life and growth are acknowledged as evidence of something larger than ourselves. That "something larger" can be called by many different names, and may refer to the presence of a specific deity, a unifying or supernatural pattern, or simply our membership in the great community of living organisms—the discovered 1,413,000 separate species—that populate the planet Earth. With understanding and acknowledgment, we can turn our own gardens into places of sanctuary. The Latin word for "sacred" gives us the word "sanctuary," denoting not only a sacred space but also a place of refuge and protection. The garden can become a place where we can restore our emotional and spiritual balance and nourish our sense and souls, away from the noise of everyday life.

Gardening is a vehicle for spiritual and emotional connection. It is, when you think about it, nothing short of miraculous: You kneel, dig a bit, drop in a seed, add waters, and wait. In time the miracle unveils itself, beginning with an ever-so-tentative shoot of green: Life! It is, perhaps, not as dramatic as being witness to the creation of the universe or event that moment when a single sperm pierces the shell of the human ovum, but for most of us it is as close as we will ever get to witnessing a miracle firsthand.

Customer Reviews

Did anyone even look at the galley proofs?!?
It must be said that this is a beautiful book! Photographs, paper, color, layout -- and the text could/would have been, too. But starting on pages 46/47, the text is totally dismembered -- big chunks missing [go from one page to the next mid-sentence and find an entirely different sentence being continued], and big chunks repeated. It made no sense to stumble through the next handful of pages, or try to read beyond: love the photos, but can't keep the book.
None of the other reviewers here mention finding this mess. Are there different printings out there?

Spiritual Gardening
This book covers a broad spectrum of 'spiritual gardens' from the more specific doctrines such as Zen, through to the individual gardeners' interpretation of what makes a garden a spiritual place. I found it to be a very good introduction to the subject and the very beautifull photographs enhance the text extremely well.

Form over substance
The design of the book is lovely. The photographs are enticing. The table of contents suggests a valuable and interesting book. But focus of the text, the information content, is excessively historical. If you want to know the spiritual significance attached to certain plants by various spiritual groups, you might like this. If you wish to create a sacred space and seek design help, there are better choices.