Projo Garden Blog

The world probably doesn't need another gardening book. And a book professing connection with spirituality, well, it's probably all been said as well. We also struggled with the word "spiritual". If the same source energy flows through all things, as we think it does, how do you separate the spiritual from the non-spiritual? By judging what we designate "good" as spiritual and the things, we call "bad" as non-spiritual? There's clearly no universally accepted definitions of "good" and "bad" – just look around the world and see how quickly that becomes obvious. So that didn't work for us.

A landscape designer friend of ours considers himself an atheist. But he loves plants with a capital L, and his work, particularly his home garden in southern Rhode Island, "feels" full of this love. Not "spiritual"? We decided we needed to take a broader view. Could it be that when you are in love with anything – a person, your dog, your cat, your garden, an armadillo, anything at all – you are fully connected to the one force that is creating the universe? In the end, we had to let go of our previously held views of people and their paths.

It was a year and a half (yup, we missed our deadline) of great fun. We were nearly always blown away after talking with people and photographing them and their special spaces. As the Russian poet Yevtushenko said, "No people are uninteresting." We were always amazed at people's connection to their gardens. To write a book was just the next logical step in our own journeys. Something to do for fun. Something to share with others. What fun is doing your passion if you can't share it with others? As our journeys, both as gardeners and as human beings, have been guided and inspired by others at various times, we hoped this book might serve the same for others.

Several years ago, we made the decision that if it wasn't fun we weren't going to do it. It took a little while for our decision to take hold and manifest as our reality but that's often how things happen, we think. We imagine it's possible to plant a seed and have a full-grown plant the next day but it doesn't often happen. We've read of instantaneous manifestations in books like Behaving as if the God in All Life Mattered and The Magic of Findhorn but we've found we often have to grow into our new belief systems and new realities.

Both my mother and father died within three weeks of each other in the spring of 2005. One day soon after their passing I was sitting quietly, trying to "make contact", trying to feel their presence and communicate in some way. I very clearly "heard" my dad say, "Survival is not what it's cracked up to be, Judy. Go out and have more fun." It was not until I heard or felt these words that the decision we arrived at several years before really took hold in present day three-dimensional reality. And so, we began having more fun. We started showing up at performances of our many musician friends. We started dancing. We started holding barn dances with our favorite Providence-based wild Celtic, folky band, the Providence Wholebellies.One little thing led to the next. The collector plant nursery and public garden we call our business, which used to have us so tied up in knots each spring, is happily going on its merry way. And we are too!

The book ended up being titled Sacred Gardens. As it turns, out the publisher gets to name it. We had wanted to call it And that would be enough - How Ordinary Gardeners create places of peace and joy. We have to think they know better than we do.