The Monastery Garden

The plans: I have finally mapped out plans for a monastery garden in my new yard. The yard is big but a lot of it wraps around the house and is long and too narrow to really lend itself neatly to a symmetrical design. You can't force design to fit spaces it doesn't belong in. There is one spot in the yard that is perfect for this style of garden. It gets tons of light, is empty aside from weeds and if I don't put something in it will attract things like broken down rusty buses.

I measured the space and using graph paper I planned raised beds to scale. !! Yes, to scale.* I planned the design to have a focal point in the center- a dwarf fruit tree. Because the soil sucks in this spot I decided to make a 2' raised bed for the tree. This will also give the beds a more formal appearance with the inner beds being taller than the outer beds.

The location: the gravel pit. You can't walk on this ground without making your feet bleed which is unfortunate. But for the purpose to which I'm going to put it, gravel is a good weed suppressant. It can eventually be replaced with pea-gravel or crushed granite* I personally like to be able to walk barefoot in my garden. Wouldn't slate pathways be gorgeous, with creeping thyme growing in the cracks? This is the official before picture.

The materials: all told this project will cost a few hundred dollars. We don't have cash for it so it's a credit transaction. Not our favorite way to finance anything but if we don't get this established now we will regret it. We got the wood yesterday. I have all week to work on this. I have an interview this morning and then I'm free. Provided my back doesn't go out on me (I will stretch!) and it doesn't get overly hot, and I can muster up the energy to work on it...(that's a lot of "ifs") I hope to have this space built and filled by this coming week-end. I want it planted with winter vegetables.

Work in progress: we always have works in progress. This is our pile of dirt. We have access to some more topsoil for free. I don't know if it will be enough but if not we will buy what we need to. Our poor neighbors always have to see our piles and our messes and these new neighbors don't know yet that we really do eventually make good with a pretty yard. Never a tidy yard, but it will be quite pretty in a couple of years. We certainly do take our time.

Alright, I'm off!

*I know, I'm impressed with me too.
**Yeah. In my dreams. Apparently we can't get it here. Dang it!

Monastery Style

This is from the book "Designing The New Kitchen Garden" by Jennifer R. Bartly which I highly recommend for anyone planning a kitchen garden.

Not a lot of my garden has been worked on in the (nearly) two years we've been here. So there is a lot of room for planning and designing. There is a lot of room to create a place of beauty and productivity. Several years ago I fell in love with the formal kitchen garden style, also known as a "potager" and the history of this garden style comes to us from deep in the history of cultivated man. It comes from man's wish to recreate the garden of eden, or paradise as he imagines it, which is an oasis in a harsh world. An inner sanctum of calm and earthly delights such as running water and trees dripping with fruit. Monastery gardens of the middle ages is where most of our more modern interpretation of the kitchen garden comes from.

In the middle ages, monks were the keepers of herbal knowledge. Which I find fascinating since only several hundred years later bible thumpers decided that herbal knowledge was dangerous and burned a whole lotta women for knowing how to make simples. Anyway, in the middle ages the monks were the people who knew herb lore, made medicines, and like all the coolest people on earth: liquor was their other specialty. I like to imagine monks as enlightened benevolent beings but I admit that if I'm really thinking about it realistically I'm not sure that monks were particularly nice about women. I mean, I think they may not have had the best view of my sex.

Monastery gardens appeal to me on many levels. One thing I love about them is the tidy order of raised beds trying to tame the wild habits of plants and vegetables. Monastery gardens are very symmetrical, linear, and geometrical which is meditative to me. It creates the sense that there are boundaries to all wildness, there is order in the chaos, and beauty in the juxtaposition of the two. I love the blend of purpose, the enclosed circle of life that plays out in a monastery garden: within the closed walls of the garden there is everything you need to survive-vegetables, animals, herbs, spirituality, fellowship, fruit, burial, recycling, and alcohol...no, wait, I meant to say- a reverence for knowledge.

The picture above is going to be the reference point for my garden plan. My neighbors just might shit bricks. No one in my town has done a garden based on a monastery model. Certainly not for their front yard. Front yards, (for anyone who was unaware), are meant to have the following elements: lawn, rhododendrons, Japanese maples, a few roses, a very green lawn, Pieris, and a hanging basket by the door.

Frozen in the weird world of our broken old hard drive are pictures of the potager I created in my last garden. It was wonderful and I surrounded the formal potager with amorphous beds of herbs and roses, kidney and tear drop shaped beds edged in rocks. Our garden was a wonderful place of both abundance and color. It had formality blended with a meandering grace. I wish I could access those pictures. Philip likes gardens with curving paths, mounds, and surprises. So there will be two sections in which we'll create the kind of space he enjoys the most and two sections that will be monastic, for me. Which is how our marriage usually plays out- a blending of our two very different styles into one life.

This is not a project that can be accomplished in one season (well, not on our budget anyway) but will take several seasons. I am going to really enjoy creating a living meditation. I'm not a person who can sit down in lotus position and breath slowly and clear my head. For me, the meditation happens when the brain is allowed to play out all it's random thoughts, when it's allowed to empty itself into the compost pile, or focus in on the wormy microcosm of which we are all a part. Meditation happens with the rhythmic pulling of weeds. Or touching all the leaves of all the plants. All the plants. Eventually my mind spills out all it's words. Eventually it has nothing left to say. Eventually it hears not the voices of all the people in the world, but just the soft shushing of the leaves breathing.