At last: a Findhorn Post!

Funny, I revived this blog at the turn of the year in order to post about my adventures at the Findhorn Community, and it's taken me this long to get to the first. Here it is:

PARK GARDEN
"Park Garden" at the Findhorn Community in northern Scotland indicates a service area, a team of people brought together to care for the park gardens. The gardens themselves comprise a disparate collection of small cultivated spaces scattered throughout the 30-acre “park” campus of this kaleidoscopic community-village. Additionally, there are many gardens belonging to individual dwellings, which are cared for by their owners.

In the tradition of William Morris, so much here is
both beautiful and useful: Flora's gate keeps out rabbits
and deer while delighting the eye. 

For more than 50 years, the Community has developed organically through the direction of spiritual and temporal imperatives, starting from a  single small caravan (mobile home) and barren sandy garden patch beside a rubbish dump, to become a vibrant complex lodestone for people concerned with environmentally sensitive living and construction, and New Age consciousness, from all over the Earth, and beyond.

For four weeks, February 2015, and maybe more, I am one of the carers of the Park Gardens. Our team is small, for even in this mild Scottish winter – mild, that is, compared with my usual habitat of northern Vermont – the ground is cold and little is yet growing. The work, therefore, consists of pruning – I hope to learn a little of the arcane art of pruning apple trees – clearing dropped branches and twigs dislodged by winter storms; raking the last of autumn’s shed leaves; cutting back overgrown shrubs and trees, and planning.

As a new and temporary member of the team I’m not involved in the planning but I bask in the glow emanating from Iris and Nikki after they’ve sat for an hour poring over the elegant herb garden diagram and discussing how they will bring to back into glory and utility this summer.

Here's Iris weeding Flora.

I have helped Peggy trim and re-locate a pile of small logs that had been cut and stacked beside a path by other community members clearing storm-felled trees. Using a hatchet to trim errant twigs and small branches – important if the wood is to be easily moved once stacked - took me back to my days brandishing a billhook on the South Downs as part of Brighton Conservation Volunteers in the 1980s. I spent many happy and rejuvenating Sundays in those days working on conservation projects, from pond digging to stile construction, from tree planting to invasive pulling, with Helen, Ron, Val, Joanne, Bernard and the rest of our faithful team. It was work that fed my soul, as I’m hoping working in the more placid Findhorn Park Gardens, will do.

I've also trimmed shrubs with Lua, raked apart the sawdust piles created by fallen tree clearance - piles that inhibit understory regeneration if left intact - and carted away branches of a pine tree that Gabi was trimming back from where it overhung the narrow road through the community, impeding the passage of high-sided vehicles. I thought the tree would look sad with so many branches removed on one side, but it just looked lighter: pine trees are very forgiving.



Moontree is an exquisite building that serves as meeting place
 for the Park Garden team. It's made with love and heated
with a darling little woodstove. That's master gardener and current team
 focaliser Kajedo Wanderer chopping kindling outside.
 

The trees, indeed, can fit themselves around our human machinations and still retain their inner essence. During my introductory tour of the Park Gardens, Gabi pointed out many trees that were planted as much as 50 years ago, and which have had to work around the humans – oh yes, and the humans have had to work around the trees -  to create the rambling and intricate layout of this exhilarating community. Rambling and intricate, I mean, in all the spheres of existence.

Plenty of kindling!

 

A closer look at Moontree's door