Mary has become a successful garden designer by hard work and triumphing over adversity. Having had some original success, her career seemed to stall, and rather than give up her chosen path she rethought her design philosophy, coming to the conclusion that the garden is to be seen as a living entity with its own level of consciousness. She also concluded that she had no desire to design and plant gardens whose owners were unwilling to relate to them as gardeners, so her designs always come with the proviso that the owners must be active gardeners.
Mary's originality is that she is designing gardens that grow out of what seems to be a pagan, but not anti-Christian philosophy of life and her Irish, Celtic heritage. Her writing is approving of some of the ideas of Biodynamics, a philosophy of gardening and farming promoted by Rudolph Steiner in the earlier years of the twentieth century, which she describes as being as close to witchcraft as you will ever find, The Garden Awakening, p 53.] However, she regards the land as conscious and being in interaction with humans. She believes that a piece of land has its own personality, to which sensitive humans should listen when they are designing a garden. Contact with the land is made by meditation, spells and rituals, and she goes into some detail about how to positively enchant a piece of ground, and this is part of her design project. While she may have a point about the impact of positive and negative thoughts on the natural world, I am wary of this sort of thing. As a retired philosophy lecturer I am critical of unsubstantiated claims about reality, and spells appeal not to my Christian world-view. I am critical of her failure to distinguish between spells and prayers, but consider that her link between the positive thought of a well-meant charm/spell and prayer is probably justified.
This is a book deeply rooted in Mary's Irish roots, and Ireland and its traditions permeate its pages like an ever-present atmosphere or ethos. Each is preceded by an Irish quotation, in the original tongue, but there is a translation.
Mary's tale is recounted Vivienne de Courcey's film, Dare to be Wild, which tells the tale of Mary's successful endeavour to create a gold winning medal at the Chelsea Show, Britain's premier flower show. The film, apparently focuses on the love interest as it charts her relationship as it grows and develops in and through her gardening endeavours. I must admit that the love interest leaves me cold, but I am a male, and my wife will see things differently.
Comments
I did not know that, but if you look at Mary Reynold's work it is the landscaping that is original.
I believe flower gardens can be planned with stock images from the right programs. I am not certain.
She makes no mention of using the computer, and as she works without detailed planting plans, or at least prefers not to use them, what kind of information could be fed into the computer to enable it to generate an image?
I also see no validity is spells.
One thing she probably does not do, and I am guessing from your description, is look at a computer generated image of how the garden in full bloom will look.
I was wondering how this article would be received, and you have made me feel quite pleased with your reaction to it.
Sounds like a fascinating book! I love the idea of relating to a garden as a living entity with personality. And there is no problem of following her philosophy of letting the wild flood in - plenty of wild flooding into my backyard!