We’ve just enjoyed the Springtime on the Mountain Open Garden trail and what a glorious array of beautiful gardens. Bustling crowds of excited gardeners, exquisite plantings and breathtaking colours, it’s an awesome weekend for gardeners and nature lovers alike. And gardening is one of those divine pursuits that can unite the most different of people. It’s a simple joy that’s creative, delicious, physical, silent and immensely satisfying. Being outside, smelling rain on the soil, discovering new buds on a deciduous tree signalling the start of spring or tiny staghorn ferns clinging to the SE side of eucalypt, blown there by the wind and bravely taking up residence – gardens are places where miracles happen every day.

And gardening has always been the pleasure of mystics and poets. Rumi and Hafiz use the analogy of a garden extensively in their poetry. The Persian garden was conceived to symbolise Eden and the four Zoroastrian elements of sky, earth, water and plants. Like the Mahabhutas (the 5 elements in the Vedic tradition: earth, water, fire, air and ether) a healthy human being and a healthy garden are a perfect balance of these elements. Persian gardens were the first recorded gardens using design principles for functionality, productivity and pleasure. Persian garden design had a major influence on and served as inspiration for other gardens around the world—from the Alhambra in Spain to the Taj Mahal and Mongolian Garden in India to the paved and tiled Andalusian courtyards with arcades, pools, and fountains testifying to their Persian roots.
Apart from the peace and the physicality of the garden, one of the biggest benefits of regular gardening is it’s creativity. A new gardening project is something lovely to focus on and provides a respite from the chaos of life and everything that’s going on in the world. Gardening stimulates your senses and gives you an immediate boost to morale, whether from growing seeds or post-weeding. Gardening is wonderful for mental anxiety.
We are nature embodied and having a conscious, loving relationship with nature is also about having that same relationship with ourselves. Nature teaches us to notice, listen to and follow the natural rhythms within us which mirror the seasons, the lunar cycle, when to seed and plant, when to let go and compost. Gardening is about being in relationship with the life, death, life cycle.
So, what has this all got to do with yoga? Well, in the same way yoga students feel calmer when they’re practicing yoga, the garden offers similar benefits.
It’s physical and silent and gives you an opportunity to focus solely on the practical be it planting or weeding. You can’t be in your head in a garden or a yoga class, you have to be in the present moment and in your own body.
Margot Wagner
Yoga Under the Bodhi Tree
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