Making Your Creative Mark In Gardening – Part 1

I’m pleased to share with you an excerpt from a new book by America’s foremost creativity coach and my writing mentor, Dr. Eric Maisel. It’s called, Making Your Creative Mark. While Eric works primarily with authors and fine, craft, and performing artists, I’ve always found his approach to be directly applicable to my work with Cultivating The Inner Gardener.

I’ve added editorial comments to the excerpt to help you see how you can use Eric’s suggestions to express more of your own creativity in the garden.

Passion and Voice

ERIC: A logical — and vital — relationship exists between passion and voice. It is very hard to be passionate about what you’re doing if you haven’t found your voice as an artist. Imagine being forced to sing an octave too high or an octave too low, straining to hit notes that you can’t really hit and that aren’t natural to you. It would be very hard to be passionate about singing in that situation.

LOIS: Couldn’t you just feel the muscles of your throat tighten as you read that? It’s the same with gardening. When we try to force ourselves to mimic a garden style that isn’t compatible with our personality and values, or duplicate gardens from books and magazines that are intended as inspiration, we short-circuit our creative instincts and passion for gardening.

ERIC: It is exactly like that with respect to whatever art you are creating. Whether you have been forced by circumstance not to create in your own voice, or whether you’ve avoided creating in your own voice for psychological reasons, the result will be a tremendous lack of passion for what you’re doing. Creating in your authentic voice produces and sustains passion.

With that in mind, here are ten tips for finding or reclaiming your voice. They are framed in terms of visual art, so if you are not a visual artist you will need to translate them so that they make sense for your art discipline.

 1. Detach from your current visual library. A very common problem, and almost always an unconscious one, is the need an artist feels to make his work look like something he holds as “good art” or “real art” — very often Old Master art. Because he possesses an internal library of the successful artworks of well-known artists, without quite realizing that he is doing it, he aims his art in the direction of those successes. It is vital that an artist detach from that visual library — extinguish it, as it were — so that his own imagery has a chance to appear.

LOIS: This is the exact opposite of the advice I normally give my clients, but take a holiday from your usual sources of garden imagery – favorite books, magazines, public gardens, etc. Go on a mental retreat. If you plan to vacation in a different climate, visit a public garden while you’re there to see how different gardens can be from one another. If you garden in a formal style, go hiking in a natural area; if you love naturalistic gardens, visit some highly stylized ones.

 ERIC: 

2. Try not to rest on skills and talent. Maybe you excel at producing dynamic-looking cats or turning a patch of yellow into a convincing sun. That you have these talents doesn’t mean that you ought to be producing lifelike cats or brilliant suns. Your strongest subject matter and style choices depend on what you want to say rather than on what you are good at producing. By all means, parlay your skills and talents — but don’t rely on them so completely that you effectively silence yourself.

LOIS: Thinking about what you want your garden to say is a new wrinkle for most gardeners, who are generally preoccupied with how the garden looks, what can be done in it, or whether favored plants can thrive there. For example, I want my garden to say that it arose out of the woods on its own and offers shelter to all living beings.

ERIC:

3. Allow risk-taking to feel risky. Very often the personal work you want to do feels risky. Intellectually, you may find a way to convince yourself that the risk is worth taking — but when you try to take the risk, you balk because you suddenly feel anxiety welling up. Remember that a risk is likely to feel risky. Get ready for that reality by practicing and owning one or two robust anxiety-management strategies.

LOIS: Post-Hurricane Sandy we took a lot of gardening risks, including uprighting a 40-foot cedar tree when we weren’t sure it could survive, restoring a major part of the garden when we were concerned about making expensive mistakes, and moving perennials at the wrong time into marginally compatible spaces. Our “robust anxiety-management strategy” was that doing nothing was not an option.

Excerpted from the new book Making Your Creative Mark ©2013 by Eric Maisel. Published with permission of New World Library http://www.newworldlibrary.com

MORE NEXT TIME…..

It’s National Public Gardens Day!

Lilacs at Willowood Arboretum

A big shout-out goes to all of the folks who delight gardeners through their daily work at public gardens across the country and the benefactors who had the foresight to understand how important these spaces are to soothing the human spirit. Staff and volunteers will be working special events this Mother’s Day weekend, so take your Mom or your special lady to a public garden to enjoy the pleasures of spring flowers.

Here in Northwestern New Jersey, Willowood Arboretum celebrates Mother’s Day with tours of its lilac collection, light refreshments, and music. You can also purchase starts of some of their unusual lilacs.

While the more than 30 public gardens in the Philadelphia area offer perhaps the highest concentration of horticultural displays anywhere, there are public gardens in every state. If you don’t find a location at

http://www.nationalpublicgardensday.org/ , use Google to search for “National Public Gardens Day” and your state name.


Enjoy!

What Gardeners Know

Cinqo de Mayo Rose

It seems that the medical establishment is just catching up with what inner gardeners everywhere already know: Mindfulness meditation is good for us and can reduce stress-related illnesses and boost the immune system. According to Dr. Hillary Campbell, as quoted in a recent Sacramento Bee article, http://www.sacbee.com/2013/04/01/5306627/medical-establishment-ponders.html , “(Mindfulness meditation) brings on a sense of peace and calmness. And it helps your attention and focus.”

Gardening done well is a moving meditation. After all, if you don’t pay close attention to what you’re doing and stay in the moment, you could destroy the very things you’re trying to grow. The repetitive movements of tasks such as weeding are familiar to every gardener as a mechanism for slowing down and looking inward.

Many gardening tasks require us to sit or kneel on, or dig in the ground, where we inhale the earthy smells and feel the texture of soils and plants. We physically reconnect to the Earth when we garden and when we’re done for the day, experience complete relaxation, deeper, slower breathing, and feelings of calm and leisureliness. All is right with the world.

Book Reviews: Orchids

Miltoniopsis can perfume the house for weeks.

This year, my inner gardener has had to back-pedal a bit and take a break from large outdoor gardening projects since we’re focused on cleaning up more than 35 trees felled by Hurricane Sandy. Still chomping at the bit to get out there and get going, I decided to temporarily turn to an on-again, off-again indoor gardening pursuit: Orchids.

If you want a long-lasting experience, orchids flower from three weeks to three months, and can make their way into a sheltered spot in the garden during the summer months, if desired.

Among houseplants, orchids offer a bedazzling array of scent and color, with leaves and flowers that range from the ordinary to the weird. Phalaeonopsis (Moth Orchids) and Papheopedilium (Slipper Orchids) are the easiest to grow, and the heady, intoxicating fragrance of a Miltoniopsis (Pansy Orchid) will fill the entire house. The latter is well worth the expense even if you ultimately lose it.

It helps to have a few good orchid books around for reference, since different types of orchids require very different growing conditions. My three favorites are Jack Kramer’s classic Gowing Orchids Indoors, Orchids, Care and Cultivation by Gerald Leroy-Terquem & Jean Parisot, and Better Homes and Gardens’ Orchid Gardening.

Growing Orchids Indoors is the oldest of the three books, and lacks the pizzazz of abundant color photos, relying instead on line drawings and black and white photos, with just a few in color. But Kramer is one of my favorite indoor plant authors and I like his style and approach. He includes insights from his own experience with individual categories of orchids, which sometimes differs from the standard suggested care. I've found this helpful when that standard care isn’t delivering the results I expected. There’s also a short section on growing orchids in windows, window greenhouses, garden rooms, and under artificial light. The accompanying photos are of Kramer’s own average house, which further encourages the notion that growing orchids is within the ability of ordinary people.

Orchids, Care and Cultivation is a great book for hort-heads and readers who enjoy immersing themselves in the history and botanical minutiae of plants. There are sections on how orchids are classified and named, how to grow them indoors and in a greenhouse, and in-depth chapters on pots and growing media, light requirements, watering, feeding, propagation, and pests. It is extensively illustrated with line drawings and color photos to help you identify the tribe to which your orchids belong. This is a great read for serious orchid enthusiasts, but may be too technical and detailed for the casual collector.

Orchid Gardening was released in 2011 and, like all Better Homes and Gardens’ titles, is profusely illustrated with luscious photographs. The Orchid Gallery is my go-to section for quick ID’s of plants that I’ve purchased without labels. It was here that I discovered that I had Miltoniopsis and not Miltonia. I was also happy to see photos of my personal challenge, Rhyncostylis gigantea included. I found the front of the book somewhat disorienting, as it borrows heavily from web-based formats, with just too much going on for the eye-brain to take in. However, once you decipher the structure of the book, you’ll find that there is a logic and organization to it that makes it easy to go back and find something again. The most helpful chapter for me was the one on identifying bugs and diseases. At last I can tell the difference between leaf spot, black rot, and crown rot, and discovered that some of my plants were suffering from drought and not too much sun, as I had thought. Clear photos show you exactly what’s wrong and clear instructions tell you what (if anything) can be done about it.

All of these books are well-organized and informative and I use each of them for different purposes.

If you purchase a book from Amazon through this blog, you should be aware that I am an Amazon affiliate and I have written for other Better Homes and Gardens titles.

Inspiration For The Inner Gardener

Although Dr. Mays did not have garden design in mind when he said this, the spirit of his thought is a suitable one for us to incorporate when cultivating our inner gardener practice:

"It must be borne in mind that the tragedy of life doesn't lie
in not reaching your goal. The tragedy lies in having no goal
to reach. It isn't a calamity to die with dreams unfulfilled,
but it is a calamity not to dream. It is not a disaster to be
unable to capture your ideal, but it is a disaster to have no
ideal to capture. It is not a disgrace not to reach the stars,
but it is a disgrace to have no stars to reach for. Not
failure, but low aim is a sin."

~ Benjamin E. Mays~

Gardening After Hurricane Sandy

Shortly after one of Hurricane Sandy’s giant arms swept through our property last October, someone asked me how my garden fared. My reply? “Garden? What garden?” If that response resonates with you, read on.

We were more fortunate than many; none of our 35 downed trees fell on the house, although some missed it by inches. There’s a ton of work ahead of us and little chance to restoring the garden to what it once was.

Time to step back and get some perspective. It’s all too easy to get swept up in the hullabaloo that surrounds clean-up efforts and give short shrift to our emotional and spiritual pain. But, like any loss, if we don’t grieve the death of our gardens, it becomes impossible to move on.

When we’re able take a longer view, we must acknowledge that this is one of the ways that Nature renews herself. In our case, the forest canopy had nearly closed, meaning that not enough sunlight reaches the forest floor to germinate tree seeds and support new growth. By clearing an opening to the sky, Hurricane Sandy provided the necessary conditions to restore part of the forest.

Where the forest is not part of the garden, it will take decades for the still-living trees to completely die and decay providing, in the interim, food for fungi, insects, salamanders, and woodpeckers, as well as shelter for small mammals. New trees might even grow up out of the fallen trunks, as happened on another part of our property. There, a cherry tree felled by a small tornado still nourishes three saplings more than a decade later.

One tree at a time. It’s too overwhelming and upsetting to take in all of the wreckage at once, but I soon realized that it didn’t matter how many trees were down. Each was a tree I had lived with for more than 60 years and its loss was real, personal, and devastating. It is appropriate to mourn. One by one, they will be evaluated, cleaned up, cut up, and some of them thoughtfully replaced.

Endings are also beginnings. Times of transition are times of both danger and opportunity. The danger is to stay stuck in grief over the beauty of what once was, how much effort has already been expended, or how long it will take to make the garden whole again. Few of the trees we plant in 2013 will reach maturity before we die, but we’ll plant them anyway.

Lemonade from lemons. The opportunity is to work on a “new” part of the garden; one that I didn’t know I was going to have. Now there’s room for the flowering trees I’ve always wanted to grow and space for the homeless cedar seedlings “temporarily” growing in the front flowerbed.

It may not feel that way now, but one day, after the last tree trunk is split and stacked, or the last inch of sand or mud is scraped away, you, too, will be eager to get back into your garden. What will you do there? In just two months, tree buds will be swelling and bulbs will start pushing their heads toward the sunlight. We don’t have long to plan for the next steps. Better get cracking!

Cultivating The Inner Gardener Featured At Franklin Lakes Public Library

Meet me at the Franklin Lakes Public Library on October 9^th, when I’ll be the featured speaker in its Lecture Series. I'll be introducing Cultivating the Inner Gardener, an illustrated talk that focuses on how gardening from the inside out creates a personal space that is not only beautiful and healthy, but also combats stress by providing a sanctuary from today's hectic world. The presentation, which includes stunning garden photos, begins at 7:00pm at the Library, 470 De Korte Drive, Franklin Lakes, NJ  07417.

I’ll explain how gardeners at every level of expertise can dig more deeply into the meaning that gardening holds for them, in order to create a more satisfying experience. Once they learn how to invest thoughtful time up front, they’ll eliminate confusion and expensive mistakes later. By planning a space that harmonizes with their personal dream of what a garden can be, homeowners can focus on the things that really matter to them.

For details, contact Linda Hagedorn at 201-891-2224.

To learn more about The Franklin Lakes Public Library, visit http://franklinlakeslibrary.org