Borders: Gardens

My initial explorations around borders and gardens started with some reflection. I love nature, trees, and forests, and never thought I would live — and love living — in a city as big as Chicago. Over the last couple of years I started my own urban garden on my back porch as a way to connect more to nature, as something to nurture and cultivate, as something to take my mind off of the pandemic, and for a variety of other reasons I’m sure. So it strikes me that gardening for me could be creating a border between different mental states, building a border between myself and the outside world… I also wonder about what constitutes the border or boundary between nature and gardening.

I then started research with Wikipedia. I learned that people have been gardening since ancient times and that gardens have served a variety of purposes. They are status symbols, sources of food, and expressions of art and philosophy. I learned that there are different ideals of what gardens should be that vary from culture to culture and across time periods.

I read an essay called Gardens as a Metaphor, by Clare Cooper Marcus, who talks about gardens from the context of creating myths and paradise myths. In many cultures, there is a creation myth in which order is created out of chaos in the form of a paradise garden. People have searched for this paradise garden on earth, and have claimed to have found it in many places. Early European and other Medieval mapmakers put paradise on maps of the known world, usually depicting them around the borders.

Marcus goes on to describe Tibetan Buddhism’s concept of Shambhala, a hidden oasis beyond the Himalayas, and searches to find Shambhala. There are many guidebooks that have been created to help people find Shambhala, which I definitely want to look into. Edwin Bernbaum concluded that Shambhala is not a place, but a state of mind, and that “we can read the guidebooks into Shambhala as instructions for taking an inner journey from the familiar world of surface consciousness to the hidden sanctuaries of the superconscious.”

Marcus theorizes that we are drawn to gardening because it unites the different hemispheres of our brain, and it “requires knowledge and intuition, science and nuturance, planning and faith.” Perhaps this theory points to gardening as something that lives at the border between different modes of being, different ways of seeing and operating in the world, an activity that can live in some sort of intersectionality.

And finally Marcus points to the idea that gardens are often set apart, held sacred, held dear. This definitely relates to the idea of borders.

I also read an essay called Nature is More Than A Garden by Ian L. Harg. It was not terribly informative, but illustrated Harg’s perspective that gardens present nature as orderly, benign, abundant, and peaceful, which is in contrast with some of the realities of nature untended by humans.

Things to research more

• Tibetan guidebooks for Shambhala
• T in O maps from the middle ages
• Rain gardens
• Victory gardens –> what would be a current form of victory garden?
• Gardens as a tool in response to climate change
• Gaia Hypothesis
• Findhorn Community garden

Explore

• Border bw nature and gardens, wilds and gardens
• trees and gardens and borders
• garden as collaboration bw humans and nature
• gardens and the idea of home
• “the known world” –> what is our version of the known world. and the unknown world?

Could make

• T in O maps
• Guide to Shambhala
• Seed collection book, survivalist seedkit
• garden quilt or a map as a quilt