Gardening and zen have had a long association. Zen monks created garden spaces and regarded the act of designing these spaces as a practice of zen. The naturalness and minimalism of these gardens lend them a distinct meditative quality. A quintessential zen garden is one with rocks, raked sand and a lot of empty space. But zen can be brought to any garden space, even to your urban balconies and desks if you understand its sensibilities.
Gardener as collaborator
As a Zen gardener, you should view yourself not as the master of the garden, but as a collaborator. Do not force your vision on the garden but trust the garden to contain the seeds of a vision. For example, if you find a tree’s branches intruding your balcony, use it as inspiration to build around, rather than chop the branches.
Controlled accidents
A zen gardener considers unexpected or spontaneous ‘accidents’ not as nuisances but gifts. For example, a crack on your balcony wall can be celebrated by training a climber to grow along it. Monsoon moss growing uninvited on your parapet can be harvested and spread over planters, embracing seasonality. This does not mean that you do not clean, prune, exercise no control. You act in the spirit of what the philosopher Alan Watts calls ‘controlled accident’, where such serendipitous ‘accidents’ feed the imagination of the gardener. This lends a zen garden the mystique of nature and calmness of order.
‘Growing’ rocks
A seasoned zen gardener searches for rocks that appear as if they ‘grew’ out of his garden. In fact, much about a zen garden – benches, walkways, gates – appear as if these grew out of it. Often they bear marks of age like discolouration, verdure, and have a sense of continuity with the rest of the garden. The same principle could be applied to curating your modern garden, like distressed terracotta pots, broken shards, aged artefacts from the attic – things that blur boundaries between natural and manmade.
Zen terrariums
These sensibilities are applicable to terrariums and miniature gardens, bringing zen to the tiniest corners. A zen terrarium does not imitate a landscape but creates a feeling suggestive of it. A simple rock-and-sand arrangement can suggest a beach, rather than imitating it with blue-coloured sand for water and miniature beach paraphernalia. Similarly, a tall, broken bark flanked by tiny succulents can bring to mind a hillscape. The idea is to keep it simple – use few elements, have one focal point for the eyes to rest upon, and enough empty space for the mind to rest.
Just as a good haiku (zen poem) refrains from using literary flourishes, zen gardens avoid elaborate adornments. After all, zen is less about more and more about less.
(The author is co-founder of greenopia.co)