Excerpt
Mysticism in the garden depends almost entirely on circumstances which are beyond your control, when the power of the elements combines with nature — in the early morning, in fog, or at dusk, for instance — to make you feel quite alone. You cannot plant to create mysticism, but certain plants will work best in mystical circumstances; they almost become people in your imagination, taking on human characteristics and attributes. You can imagine that they are looking at you or coming towards you.
Mysticism may be a strange word to use with regard to a garden. It is best defined as a spiritual experience where one feels at one with the whole of creation, and hence at one with the divinity itself. The thirteenth-century German Dominican Meister Eckhart is one of the best-known Christian exponents of the same philosophy, while Sufis of Islam are also familiar to many. By turning the conventional view of gardening upside down, however, it is possible to create a vision of the garden which sees nature as supreme. The concept of the sublime has illustrated that it is possible to feel in awe of the garden, and it is only one step beyond this to see the garden as a paradigm of creation, and the human role within it as a minor one. Rather than controloing and taming nature, the gardener merely orchestrates living things that have their own rythems and processes, over which he/she has litle control. The mystic wants to feel as though he is an integral part of nature, the expression of divine beauty, so the mystic's garden is somewhere very personal where it is possible to feel at one with nature — gardening as a spiritual exercise!