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 a mint strawberry sandwich
- napping amongst wildflowers
On our first play date, we made a garden mandala. A mandala, you say? But, I’m not Buddhist!
Mandalas are symbolic geometric designs sacred to many spiritual traditions, particularly Hinduism and Buddhism. Mandalas 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 Garden 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.
How To Make Your Garden Mandala:
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. (Trail, 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. Gayla asks:
“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).
My attention was drawn to a flurry of ants hurriedly scurrying about all the chambers of the columbines. What were they doing, I wondered? They didn’t appear to be feeding. My curiosity grew. I still want answers.
Over the course of days, 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.
As someone who ponders the impermanence of life and the objects in it, the accumulation of things has long haunted me. For me, the mandala thus represents a therapeutic outlet for accumulating things in a pattern of structured obsolescence. Trick your bad side into channeling its urges into less destructive things!
References
Trail, G. (2017). Grow Curious: A Journal to Cultivate Wonder in Your Garden and Beyond. Chronicle Books.