Thought for the Week: A gift of a week
Creating a garden
A little while ago over two thousand creative, thoughtful, enquiring, campaigning Quakers travelled to Bath in search of inspiration. You may have been one of them and I hope you found everything you were looking for. You may even have come across the Quaker Legacy Garden. Out on a limb, at one end of the university campus on a rather drab ‘L’ shaped patch of grass, something wonderful began to take shape. During the planning of Yearly Meeting Gathering (YMG) 2014 an offer was made to gift this little plot to Quakers to see what could be made of it. The Quaker Gardens Project set about gathering Friends to transform it into a peaceful garden reflective of the Quaker way and, when the whole YMG caravan moved on, give it back as a lasting gift to university staff and students. But could this really work… all in a week? We hoped so!
Inspiration for the design came from reflecting on George Fox’s journeys across the country on foot. He would have found the approaches to our garden familiar: an oak gatepost and wall of local stone at one end with a woven hurdle, made from coppiced hazel, at the other. Whichever way you enter the boundaries may seem solid and traditional but, as with all gardens, it’s what happens within the boundaries that matters. The traditional hedgerow, with fruit trees now lovingly pruned, banks down into a serpentine border of scented insect and bee friendly shrubs, which are mostly locally grown and will give year round interest. Low growing dry borders lend colour and texture and demand little moisture or maintenance. At the heart of the Legacy Garden is a ‘Q’ shaped seating area of local stone: filled steel gabion cages topped with green oak plank seating. The central focus – a bee-friendly thyme carpet – is spread out at your feet. It is a living, growing tapestry. Rising up from the tail of the Q is a green oak, hand carved, way-sign, with the Quaker testimonies inscribed on the upright and the directional message ‘Heart + Mind Prepared’. The sign points the way from the gathered garden out into the world. A university is a place of discovery, change and growth. In humans, as well as plants, growth points are vulnerable. How valuable, then, such a peaceful, holding, outdoor place becomes for passers-by in our pressured and stressful modern world?
What began as a gift from South West Friends hosting the Gathering grew through the week. At our morning quiet time, ‘Still in the Garden’, we ran out of chairs! Many Friends joined our core team, taking up tools to lend a hand for an hour or more between sessions. We needed a tender hand to help us get up off our knees at times and were sustained by a constant stream of tea and biscuits – almost a café in the garden. It was a place where Friends, having found it, simply wanted to sit. Funds donated for plants and materials meant that we covered our costs, and the real gifts were the inspirational people taking part, meeting like minds and holding conversations unlikely to take place anywhere else. It’s not just about the gardening. It’s about nurturing our growing spirit as Friends. By the end of the week – new skills acquired and new Friends made – there was a great sense of ‘We made it!’ It was a blessed time – a gift of a week – given and received. The Legacy Garden is there, open to all, to revisit whenever you pass – the latest in a valuable chain of Quaker places. Why not return, take a cutting or seeds (literally or metaphorically) and encourage your Area Meeting to invest in the Spirit present and growing in our gardens and burial grounds across the land?
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