Learning the language of nature
Watching the natural world regenerate each season has helped distinguished academic and author Joanna Geyer-kordesch to rehabilitate after suffering a stroke. She believes green spaces lift us all
Gardens and their plants enliven us. Their green spaces lure us. And their creativity can lead to our creativity. They show us not only the peace and quiet that parks or back gardens provide, but also how to focus on slower time – or time in different forms.
Now, I am looking back to a time when I was not disabled and then the years when it was very hard to reconcile my body with its restrictions; this last episode was frustrating.
Gardens and plants helped me to redefine how to create new activity and new visions. I’m not claiming it was an easy way forward. But one crucial aspect was to reach beyond being inactive: to see and be part of Nature. To expand my knowledge.
What really helped was to appreciate the growth and the regeneration in winter which spurs new growth in the next spring. This cyclical renewal of plant life tells not only the disabled that it is vital to consciously see the importance of fallow periods and renewed variants of growth. Steps forward need pauses.
This is as true of a child learning to walk as it is of a young person choosing their occupation.
I am surrounded by bare-branched trees in the winter. All they do for a time is shake in the wind. If the gusts are strong, they keel far into the heaving wind that roughly combs the twigs and moves stems. In this the trees also clutch the ground. But looking closer at the tops of these trees, you see growing buds that will emerge as green leaves. They are leathery, protecting themselves and growing.
In a period not defined by the clock, but by clouds and sunlight, trees enable themselves to wear their glorious, dishevelled locks and the buds that herald a new season. No haircut needed. And in autumn leading to winter they drift in bronze, gold, yellow, crazy red singularity and brown despair, dropping and wafting to the ground. Follow that and you are fascinated.
This will draw out some not to be neglected traits. First is observation. Secondly there is the beauty of colours which fascinate and can teach the variants of tints and hues and combinations that are striking. Then all trees learn to withstand tough opposition and so can you. Plants and branches sway in the wind – but their roots clutch fast to an everfertile ground.
I have come to love what is mute companionship. You learn the language of plants. Their leaves speak to you about how you water, how you mulch, how you prune. The reward is blossom in varied colour and shape. Each plant exhibits its own morphology.
And then you can translate into pencil smudges and drippings of paint the view of each blossom or leaf you choose for illustration. Yes, these happenstances might begin your adventure into creative work – or even become explicit, admirable, drawings and botanical watercolours. But who cares what shape your reaction on paper is?
The courage is to begin and to establish your own handprint and the respect you develop for each plant is your individuality. Creativity is not judged. It is your own doing. What you do – disabled or not – devolves into skill. What you look at closely is inevitably learned by your hand.
As with gardens or green spaces, we too are immersed in the hope of seasons changing. Even if buried in snow, the landscape is attuned. And we are in it. The black limbs of bare trees wave to us.
The wind blows through them, whispering ‘Don’t forget your wanderings, physically and spiritually. They are never ending.’
And it does not have to be outside. Inside is even richer and more important. That is why everyone should go into a garden or park and look. And I do not preclude that window. It is a framework for your imagination.
I go back in history. It helps to know we have engaged with gardens for centuries. They provide an indisputable characteristic: looking at what you see. Landscape gardens in particular show how much thought it took to group characteristics. They help specialise what you encounter or search to find
– or say in your own picture. This can be a note to yourself or a honing of skills on the paper before you.
Yes, I am frustrated that I cannot walk unaided now and sometimes I am not taken seriously just because I am in a wheelchair. It is horrible that physical disablement reigns over mental capacity when the outside world looks at you. But there are ways around things that can be invented. And circumvention can be creative.
I have experienced kindness and attention at garden centres when I say that botanical nomenclature is confusing and nothing like seeing the plant itself. And I am given a lot of help when I go wheeling up to a pot and choosing it!
Disability is limiting, but despite this, people are willing to talk with you and you with them. All of a sudden and with little introduction.
Plants are a good third party. Silent in staring at you, upwardly mobile as you immerse them in garden soil. They are as talkative as you are, but let you decide how to admire them.
Their language is blooms and leaves. Yours is to chatter – either to them, about them, or in the air talking poetry since it’s the best way to describe them. They will allow you peace and your own creativity. Being a couch potato is no way to engage or perceive, make yourself heard, or enjoy the very new colours of a very new plant that has just been pointed out to you. Make way to the green
Even if buried in snow, the landscape is attuned. And we are in it. The black limbs of bare trees wave to us. The wind blows
space that enriches what you are.
I walked landscape gardens for many years seeing how various designed landscapes affected me. I went to Painshill, Rousham, Stowe, Stourhead, Studley Royal, Inverary, Dunkeld, Culzean Castle, Dessauwoerlitz and Sansouci in Germany and landscape gardens in Austria and more. This was before I had my stroke. Then I read about landscape gardens like Versailles near Paris and Little Sparta in Scotland. Disability and a wheelchair do restrict you in walking any paths not level or smoothed out. But not all is inaccessible.
If nothing else, you can enjoy the more prominent landscape gardens through pictures and photographs in the many books produced. Old and new ones show them in their seasons and often accentuate their temples and sightlines, statues, lakes and strategically placed trees.i wrote this book because I wanted to engage others with the joys of looking around green spaces. Painting and talking about plants makes me happy, and allows me to explore the spaces close to me, along with the many meaningful vistas that are incorporated into grand landscape gardens. They disclose more and more meanings as you get to know them. And the peace and imaginative stimulation of all plant-rich places have lasted for so many centuries. Then and now. Enjoy!