Gardens – Literary Perspective
As world become more urbanized, botanical gardens offer us, city dwellers, a mental escape from everyday pressure. Garden is like a metaphor for a life’s journey. When you start a walk through the garden you are like a newborn child. You do not know the meaningful concept of your genom. As time goes by you can unravel its general appearance and patterns of its design. It is partly a matter of good luck and partly persistent application. It is like solving the mystery of human DNA in which external appearance and inborn behaviour tendencies are encoded.
The prime consideration in skilled maintaining is particularly important / vital both in case of gardens and human beings. This what is called ‘good plant – culture practices’ when talking about gardens can be compared not only with just awakening the knowledge encoded in your DNA. It deals with a second genetic code that make up the human which acts like a gardener who waters some plants, omitting the others. That epigenetic code turns up or silences the activity of genes living the DNA sequence untouched.
Furthermore, gardens like people are influenced by culture. However, under all latitude garden is basically considered as a collection of living plants, in fact each culture gives it its special traits and values. The same with people. However, the same basic processes underlie all human thought the culture we live in molds our habits of thought. Easterners appear to think more ‘holistically’, paying greatest attention to context and relationship, relaying more on experience – based knowledge than abstract logic. Westerners are more ‘analytic’ in their thinking, tending to detach objects from their context and to rely more heavily on formal logic.
Garden also illustrates the relationships within the plant groups. It recalls human society in which good manners are very important part of child’s upbringing. The word ‘etiquette’ initially meaning ‘Keep off the grass !’ has evolved. Now describes a code of social values which establishing the boundaries of accepted civil behaviour, allows our human relationships and us to grow like flowers in Louis XIV’ garden.
Pregnant with meaning, gardens like people, differ among themselves. Each individual looks differently, has different patterns of thinking and behaviour. Gardens have different natures, too. Green hedges and paths cause that you cannot move freely in whichever direction you want. After sometime you realize that there is something more in it. Gardens are a kind of mind games and you must use a complex of steps to solve them. Some of them are like labyrinths. Unicursal, with one well – defined path without any tricks and dead ends. They have passive, receptive mindset and they are a right brain task since they demand creativity and imagery. They offer a quite simple choice namely whether to enter them or not. The other gardens are like mazes. Full of twists, blind alleys, intersections and turns. They are multicursal therefore challenge the choice – making part of human nature. Finding the right path into the maze requires also more analytical, logical, but also more creative and inspirational activity which come from both right and left hemisphere of human brain. By the virtue of its very lively complex nature where old – fashioned linear thinking fails that kind of gardens is likely to teach its visitors lateral thinking, being ready to explore possibilities, not just going down one route. Instead of using hard and unadaptable logic we are pushed to flow like a water round obstacles. Failure becomes one of the greatest catalysts for positive change because when people work out a difficult, complex problem in a standard methodical fashion brain has two distinct ways of solving it. The breakthrough moment in which all information is integrated in a new way and reinterpreted comes thanks inspiration which is quantitatively different from ordinary contemplation and thought.
That is why gardens may release talents and abilities we do not realize we have. Enjoying and exploring them is like taking the journey of humanity which help us to discover its new dimensions. Well, it is certainly true that all the intelligence in the word is useless unless it is applied in the right way. It is like judging gardens more by their layouts and patterns then by the excellence of its plant collections and relationship between them. Such approach is not the proper way to solve the legendary mystery of gardens.
Maya Kowalczyk
Autorka ukończyła Uniwersytet Medyczny w Katowicach, podyplomowo zarządzanie i marketing na rynkach zagranicznych GWSH / Europäische Akademie für Führungskräfte Stuttgart, handel zagraniczny na Uniwersytecie Ekonomicznym w Katowicach, The American Academy Kaplan oraz studia magisterskie na kierunku zarządzanie, specjalność zarządzanie przedsiębiorstwem europejskim w Śląskiej Wyższej Szkole Zarządzania w Katowicach ( dyplomy z wyróżnieniami ).