Gardening
Walk as if you are kissing the earth with your feet.
– Thich That Hanh
A garden may be any combination of edible, medicinal, or aesthetically pleasing plants that you relish discovering each day as they grow and dream of while they lay dormant in the winter.
Whether it is a place purely of Mother Nature’s design or a place you cultivate, the garden is a source of amazement and solace. Ideally a place not overly kempt with enough room for the faeries to settle in as well as a hospitable environment where insects, birds, critters and humans can thrive.
~ garden to kitchen to clinic to wellness
We pluck the weeds for nourishment, medicine and gratefully appreciate they have drawn us down closer to the earth to view her secrets first hand falling into introspection at the point of plants and earth meeting. Here we can notice the light reflecting off the leaves and the warmth held in the blossoms. It is a place where you know each inhabitant as an individual. Welcome a volunteer and dive curiously into why they have arranged themselves as they have. Who are the dominate ones? Who could use a smidgen of support for their delicate personalities? We thank the tap roots for breaking up the soil, the nearly invisible mycelium for spreading nutrients and sending help to those who require assistance. Where the boundaries of the mowed and the ‘beds’ is blurred and changeable. Thickets of underbrush where saw whet owls find refuge so low to the ground. Berries, hips and seeds free for the taking for those winged friends who frequent the peace and ease the garden envelops them in. Species mixed and plentiful so as not to overwhelm the bugs into a frenzy of uncontrollable excitement.
I arrived in the Wood River Valley in 1982 and have gardened professionally creating, designing, installing and maintaining hundreds of gardens since 1986 when I created Susan Michael Gardening. It has been my pleasure to care for some of these gardens continuously for more than twenty years. I have come to know the micro climates, different soil compositions and the magical factors that allow those plants that ‘shouldn’t’ grow at 6000’, to thrive.
I would be pleased to guide you to discover what your land has to offer you. How and where it is being stifled from its purest expression in order to fully benefit from the healing the land and her plants have to share with you. We collaborate to bring the gardens- not necessarily constrained into plotted beds- and indeed the entire landscape into settings of healing and natural beauty. We can use less irrigation, employ less machines to mow, blow and loosen the restraints on limited perceptions of a garden.
Your yard can be your sanctuary- the living space- to be in, be calm in, be in wonder in, and be riotously joyful in! A space that guides you to reset your rhythms and breathe. You’ll see, feel, know your well being escalate as you participate in relationship with your garden and the whole of your landscape, especially with the clovers, dandelions and all their friends in the mowed.