The Garden Awakening Designs to nurture our land and
ourselves - 1st Edition
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Dedication
This book is dedicated to Ferdia and Ruby Reynolds. The two most loved,
important and magical creatures I have been lucky enough to plant and
grow. How blessed I am to wake up in your world every day.
Thanks to My Tribe
Many, many thanks to my kind, clever, wonderful manager and friend
Claire Leadbitter and the wildly talented artist Ruth Evans who illustrated
this book so beautifully. The gentle earth energy that radiates from Ruth’s
work is magical and I am eternally grateful to Claire and Ruth for having
these images weave their way through this paper garden. I am honoured to
share this journey with these two strong women.
Thank you to my editor and long-time hero Larry Korn from the bottom
of my heart. I was more than blessed to have your guidance and wisdom
with this work. You nourished and encouraged these pages until they
blossomed. What words can I say to express my gratitude Larry? You Rock!
What an important warrior you are in natures green army.
Thank you so much to Niall, Lisa, Lindsey and Megan and all involved
at Green books for carefully sending this manuscript out into the world. A
huge shout out to Glyn Bridgewater for your beautiful and thoughtful book
design.
To all of the good people who have been integral to this story. My big
brother Paul Reynolds, his wife Susanna and his business partner Declan
Owens in Seattle who always opened doors for me as a writer, in and out of
my head. A special thank you to my great sisters Mairéad, Áine and her
dear husband Joe, my lifelines. My brothers Eoin and Ger Reynolds and
their wives Kevina and Martina.
Pat O’Connor from Rathmore in Kerry. Pat, there are no words that can
express my gratitude for keeping me alive and well, but thank you is a start.
Maria and John Rawlins, thank you both wholeheartedly for your constant
guardianship.
My dear friends who occasionally read and encouraged over the years,
Marketa Irglova, Karen Allison, Eileen Kelliher, Edel O’Brien, Paula and
Tony Hayden, Sheila MacNally, Yvonne McGuinness. Special thanks to
Breda Enright, Lauren Williams and Séamus King for giving expert
guidance and wisdom. Colm Mac Con Iomaire for your expert Irish and
encouragement. Gratitude and love to those who walked with me along the
way. Namely Tor Cotton, Áine Berry, Siobán O’Leary, Rachel Ward,
Gráinne and Paddy Fenton, Martin Cuthbertson, Bruce Allison, Deirdre
Teahan, Eilish McVeigh, Della O’Donoghue, Lesley Devane, Michelle
Flannery, Áine and John O’Connor, Joe, Izzy and Ellie Doyle of Claire’s
tribe, Jenn Halter Prenda, Christy Collard, Libby and Paddy Meegan, James
Alexander – Sinclair, Maria Manuel Stocker, Catherine de Courcey, Joyce
McGreevy, Joe Mullally, Gaby Smyth, Andrew Smith for the prompting,
Vivienne de Courcy, for your courage. Thank you to my Wexford tribe,
Linda and Jake Garnett, Janice O’Regan Conroy, Carmel and Patrick Nolan,
John Pettit, Claudia O’Brien and all of the dedicated side-line mammies and
daddies. Jane Powers, thank you for prodding us towards Green books.
Thank you Gillies Mackinnon for our much valued ‘wee correspondence’
through which I discovered a love of writing. My mother and father, who
gave me everything I am, bless you both forever and ever. Amen.
Mostly, thanks to my green family, visible and invisible. You are my
heart, my dreams and my reason for being.
Grá agus Ómós.
Love and respect.
Foreword
Mary Reynolds’s gardens are not only beautiful to look at, they feel
different. Walk through one of them and you are transported to a time when
people and nature lived together as one family. We still remember that time,
but it is lying dormant in our subconscious. In The Garden Awakening Mary
delightfully guides us along “an old pathway, overgrown and forgotten” to
that place. She combines the magic of old Irish ways, sacred patterns and
symbols, the power of intention, and sound organic management practices
to create spaces in which nature can express itself freely and fulfill its own
destiny. In the process the gardener, the land’s guardian, experiences a
personal transformation in which their painful separation from nature is
healed.
This book is at once practical, philosophical, and spiritual. It is a step-
by-step guide to restoring health to the land, and in the process discovering
the truth of who we are. Although Mary lives in a temperate region and
draws inspiration from her Irish ancestors, her approach to garden design is
universal and can be applied anywhere, whether on a large property or a
small urban yard. It is a matter of listening carefully to the needs and wishes
of the land and combining them with your own.
Mary’s message is one of vision and hope. It shows the way to a
brighter future in which people, nature, and all other forms of life live
peacefully together in a world of health and abundance.
Larry Korn, 2016
Introduction
Everything becomes simple when you immerse yourself in nature. Life’s
complications melt away, leaving only the truth of the present moment and
the presence of what I call God. In this place we can see ourselves reflected
in every living thing, every gust of wind, every splash of rain, and here we
can find peace. This is our true home.
Yet we are losing what few wild places we have left; those patches
where the spirits of the earth are flowing freely, where harmony and balance
still exist, and we feel accepted for the truth of who we are. We have strayed
off course and need to find our way again.
An old pathway, overgrown and forgotten, is waiting impatiently to lead
us back home.
Nature is willing us on.
Restoring Wellness
Ní féidir an dubh a chur ina gheal, ach seal.
The truth will out.
I have always loved crows. Great families of them would sit in the ash trees
outside my parents’ farmhouse, gossiping and chatting with big throaty
cackles all through the day and into the mellow evenings, when they would
eventually fall into a comfortable silence. Not long ago, these creatures
began to reappear in my dreams, finally exposing the niggling truth about
why I had begun to lose interest in designing gardens.
One memorable dream reminded me of times spent in nature as a child.
It made me realize that after years of working as a landscape designer, I
couldn’t design gardens in the same way anymore. Something was amiss.
I embodied a crow in the dream. Soaring over woods and hills, I could
hear my name being called. I swooped and searched to find the source of
the voice, through valleys of mossy rocks, ancient woodlands, fields of
rushes and reeds, over streams and rivers. As a bird, I had the ability to hear
and see every small thing, and the images and sounds were clear and
focused. I could hear water bubbling and gurgling in the streams, and the
leaves of the trees rattling against one another. The wind was dancing
around me and I could see mice scurrying through grassy meadows and life
surging through the tree trunks.
The voice calling my name became louder, more insistent. It seemed to
be coming from a nearby woodland, so I chased the sound through the trees
towards a lone figure sitting on a log waiting for me. As I got close, the
noise suddenly ceased and I stopped still in mid-air above the woman’s
head. I was frozen in time and space, staring down at a human version of
myself, but painted blue. Leaning on a large stick, she simply smiled
cheekily up at my bird self. She didn’t say a word, but somehow it was like
a key turning in my head and everything opened up.
Suddenly, the dream went into reverse and I was sucked upwards, out of
the picture as if caught in a huge vacuum in the sky.
The moment I woke up, the dilemma I had been struggling with became
clear as a bell. I shouldn’t be making any more pretty gardens. Gardens had
become the emperor’s new clothes; something was wrong but no one was
saying anything.
Nature and the land were the answers. Gardens were like still-life
paintings; controlled and manipulated spaces. They were poor versions of
the real deal – untamed nature, and the delicate yet strong skin of Mother
Earth. Somehow, somewhere along our way, gardens had become dead
zones.
People are drawn to gardening because it helps them feel connected to
nature. The words ‘gardens’ and ‘nature’ have become almost synonymous,
but in reality they have very little in common any more. You can view this
split between gardens and nature as a mighty battle. The frontline on the
gardener’s side generally involves a lot of hard work and vast quantities of
chemicals. Subversive tactics and guerrilla warfare are nature’s weapons of
choice.
And, of course, time is always on nature’s side.
Finally, I understood that despite my efforts to the contrary, I was failing
to work in harmony with nature in my garden designs. I made two decisions
based on 20 years of designing gardens, which I now realized had failed the
ultimate test. They were decisions that forced me to re-examine everything I
was doing with regard to my work, and they led to me writing this book.
First, I had missed the most important part of the puzzle. Although my
gardens were beautiful spaces that allowed energy to flow freely through
them, the land did not want to remain as I had designed it. We had to
continue controlling these spaces, to stop things that wanted to grow from
growing. The land had its own intentions. Nature had her own ideas about
design and I had to learn what they were. Garden maintenance is fighting
against the intentions Mother Nature has for herself. I had to understand
how to work with this energy rather than against it.
Second, I decided that it was impossible to continue designing gardens
for other people without their taking a more active role and assuming
responsibility for the land. I could not construct a bond between the land
and my client because, at the end of the day, I would walk away as the
relationship was not mine to uphold any longer. My clients had to form and
maintain their own meaningful connection with their little piece of earth.
I’ve discovered that gardens can become something very special if we
approach them differently. If we invite Nature to express her true self in
these spaces and then work to heal the land and bring it back into balance,
something magical happens. Nature begins to interact with us on an
energetic, emotional and physical level. Your garden becomes your own
personal church; a place of safety, abundance and peace. Once recognized,
loved, and respected, Nature will embrace you in ways that most people
have not experienced for many, many years. A magical doorway opens for
us.
This book is steeped in old Irish ways of interacting with the land. It
offers a practical step-by-step instruction manual, one that will help you
bring the land back to life. The practices I describe are based on those of my
own culture, but they are similar to the practices that traditional people have
used throughout the world for tens of thousands of years. They constitute a
way of life that is deeply ingrained in our DNA.
We need to remember and reset our roots; to acknowledge the pain we
feel as a result of our separation from the earth beneath our feet. The earth
feels this loss as much as we do. The land we work with on our farms,
urban parks and gardens is nearly dead on every level of being, but it is not
too late to revive it. Not yet.
