Feng Shui

The more people you talk to about Feng Shui and gardening, the more opinions on it you get. Ms. Robin Wood, a very talented landscape architect once told me, “Feng Shui gardening is really just good landscape design.”

And to a point, I would agree with her. In many ways the ancient Chinese philosophy of Feng Shui, also called Fen Shui, is all about creating harmony. In a true Feng Shui garden the focus is on the atmosphere. A garden is created that encourages meditation, relaxation, close connections to Nature.

A good Feng Shui garden does not ignore any of our senses. There are fragrant flowers to smell, wind chimes, the sounds of water, and the songs of birds to please our ears, shade from the hot sun, protection from the wind, places just to sit and think, contrasting surfaces to feel, beauty to please our eye, and perhaps even some fruit or vegetable for our tongue to taste.

A true Feng Shui garden is not strictly formal, overly clipped, too tidy and sanitary, all drawn with squares and rectangles. Shrubs don�t need to be square nor do all trees need to resemble each other. A quiet restrained informality is encouraged. Love, peace, understanding, and wisdom reign in a true Fen Shui garden.

In many ways during all my years at the Youth Authority, although I didn’t know it at the time, I was instinctively trying to develop a Feng Shui garden. Surrounded by guards, gangs, and concertina razor wire, I aspired to create an
inner sanctum, a natural place for me and my students to remove ourselves from all the bad vibes so very close by.

I am not a Feng Shui expert by any means and certainly do not claim to be, but I have read a great deal about it, listened to numerous talks given by so-called experts, and I have long been interested and involved in garden design. I think that Fen Shui does indeed have much to offer and that it is well worth exploring. However, I often notice a certain snobbishness surrounding the subject. One expert writes that none of the others know what they�re talking about, especially the Western writers and speakers. I�ve met some Fen Shui designers and writers who were cold, impersonal and rude, none of which jives with true Fen Shui in my mind. I sometimes encounter a similar snobbishness with people who refuse to grow any plants not native to their own little local area. My feeling about all these snobby attitudes in gardening is this: Elitism doesn�t belong in the garden. Plants aren�t critical, let�s not be that way ourselves. Many people, far wiser than I, have long known that the more we learn about something, the more we realize how little we know. Harold Young, the wonderful senior editor of Pacific Coast Nurseryman Magazine once wrote me in an email, “I used to think I knew a lot of plants.”

I know just what he means.

This article is an excerpt from the book, Safe Sex in the Garden, from Ten Speed Press, 2004. The author, Tom Ogren, does consulting on allergy-free landscapes for the USDA, for the American Lung Association, county asthma coalitions, hospitals, schools, allergists, and other groups. Tom is the author of Allergy-free Gardening, and the numerical allergy/plant ranking system, OPALS, which can be found on www.allegra.com. Tom’s website is www.allergyfree-gardening.com