I wasn’t always interested in plants. It wasn’t until my 20s when I came across Gayla Trail, aka You Grow Girl, that I got hooked. Here was someone who really tapped into all the things I like: doing things DIY on a budget with a low barrier to entry, plants from around the world, art and beauty. This is the multifaceted gardening experience I longed for.
Years later, I keep returning to her book Grow Curious, released in 2017. Each page prompts the reader to wonder and to explore nature and the world we live in through all seasons, using all senses, tapping both the right and left brain and whatever is in between.
Grow Curious 2017 edition. Credit: Davin Risk
In 2021, I held a Grow Curious workshop at Alice’s Garden Urban Farm thinking that a bunch of like-minded adults would show up to have fun with me playing in the garden. Instead, a bunch of like-minded 5-year-olds showed up with their weary parents.
Perhaps the parents were weary from bills, ennui, and the existential dread arising from a collapsing world order. I get it. That’s why, for a little patch of time, we instead imagined things like:
- petting bumblebees
- eating mint strawberry sandwiches
- napping amongst wildflowers
On our first play date, we made a plant mandala. A mandala, you say? But, I’m not Buddhist!
Mandalas are symbolic geometric designs sacred to many spiritual traditions, particularly Hinduism and Buddhism. They are used as a focal point or tool to aid in trance and meditation. Elaborate, complex designs focus the attention of the observer, inducing a meditative state.
Tibetan and other Buddhist practices incorporate mandalas made from sand, representing the impermanence of things, wherein care is taken to create an intricate and beautiful design in a medium that is not meant to last and in fact will be purposely destroyed.
Making a Plant Mandala
You don’t have to be a monk to make a mandala. Making your own mandala using plant materials is a fun way to look at nature in a new way and make some (impermanent) art.
Here’s how to make your plant mandala, says Gayla:
Collect a range of materials from your garden: bark, seeds, seed heads, stems, leaves, whole flowers, petals, flower buds, roots, etc.Choose a blank or uniform surface and arrange the various bits in an artistic circular or spiral configuration on top of natural surfaces such as a patch of grass, soil, or mulch. Consider hard surface backdrops such as a large piece of colored paper, a wooden tabletop, or a stone path. Go public and assemble it where people can see and interact with it — the sidewalk, a parking lot, a driveway, the boulevard, or your front yard.Allow nature to degrade or destroy your mandala. (2017, p. 73)
In the process of making the mandala, you may notice things about the flowers or other plant parts you never noticed before.
In making the above mandala, my attention was drawn to ants hurriedly scurrying about all the chambers of the yellow columbine flowers. What were they doing, I wondered? I still want answers.
Garden mandalas can also prompt spiritual or emotional reflection. For me, the mandala represents a therapeutic outlet for accumulating things in a pattern of structured obsolescence.
Your mandala can be as meticulous or as non-meticulous as you like. You can throw a bunch of flowers in a basket and see what happens. You can place paired pieces in concentric rings so everything is symmetrical. You can mix and match colors. Your mandala is a reflection of you and what’s growing in your environment at a particular moment in time.
Your mandala will disintegrate little by little each day. The garden mandala is only permanent if you take a photo. Some might consider a photo to objectify the living, breathing processes of nature. I’m OK with capturing beauty and memories.
“What story does your mandala tell about your garden right now? Do the plants you chose and the assemblage you created say anything about you, too? (Trail, 2017, p. 73).
References
Trail, G. (2017). Grow Curious: A Journal to Cultivate Wonder in Your Garden and Beyond. Chronicle Books.