Britain's Little Revolution: Being a Gardener, An Invitation to Awe and Serenity

The tradition of spending hours in the garden, cultivating, clearing and planting, has a special place in Anglo-Saxon culture, and requires training patience, to wait or give up when a plant does not prosper; amazement when spring blooms; joy when you achieve a harmonious ensemble.

You don't need a big garden to be a gardener: a pot is enough to enjoy the miracles of nature.

The writer Paulo Coelho says that we can decide between being builders or gardeners: we can behave as if we were blocks of stone, unable to change, or accept our contradictions and learn to live with them in a more flexible way, as if we were gardeners. The builders build, but once the building is finished, if you do nothing, it only changes for the worse and degrades over time. The gardener, on the other hand, has to arm himself with patience and count on the tempo of nature - so similar to that of the human psyche - but if he adapts himself to the terrain, if he chooses his plants according to the earth and the climate, he is ahead of the problems and the pests, if he repairs the damages when they are inevitable ... he achieves a garden to his measure, full of life, every day more consolidated, more fertile. Therefore, says Coelho, being a gardener can be more enriching than being a builder. In a way, having a gardener mentality helps to sow, agree with nature, accept change, prune, collect ... The landscape of a full mental and emotional life is the fruit of a personal search. Of a journey that we all have to undertake.

«Your mind is a garden. Your thoughts are the seeds. You can grow flowers or grow weeds.»
Anonymous