Learn more about water symbolism here. If water and water garden meaning intrigues you, then you may be interested in exploring Undines, which are water elementals. Check out my article on Undines here to employ a more enriching perception of water.
Perhaps one of the most unusual and unique of gardens, rock gardens are designed to connect with themes like:. Rock garden meaning is keenly linked with Earth symbolism. Rocks and stones are children of mountains , and as such, they represent heavy expressions of matter and tactile stuff.
Where flower and water garden meaning deal with delicate beatitudes, rock garden meaning serves a purpose of anchoring our energies , and bonding with the grounding sensations the Earth provides. Why would we want to become more grounded? Namely, to extract ourselves from the modern-day hustle-bustle, fast-paced world. Motion is a miracle…but too much too fast can be a killer in the form of stress. Communing with stones has a tendency to pull us in gravity that causes us to slow down, become still , and calm.
Try a stone meditation some time. That is, sit among a bevy of stones or rocky formations with a goal to become as a pebble yourself. Feel the heaviness of yourself rooting you to the core of the Mother Earth.
Feel that solid stability giving you substance, strength and confidence that yes, indeedy — you have a place here, and have a right to stand your ground in this crazy world.
The core of rock garden meaning is acceptance — sometimes stuff just lands where it does, and sometimes all we can do is accept it, and move around the rocks as best we can. You may also like my article on Grounding Earth Meditations. I find it interesting that most rock gardens in the world are natural, and not created by the hand of man at all.
Nature forms herself in breathtaking arrangement, especially when it comes to where stones wind up, and how they form. As rock gardens are rarely forged by human hands, I find this symbolic of surrender , and going with the natural process of things.
To be sure, there are a lot more types of gardens available for our pleasure and contemplation, and certainly more aspects of symbolic meaning connected to these and other gardens. This article on garden meaning is just a primer for the purpose of kindling our awareness to the idea that gardens represent so much more than just cultivated plots of land. My hope with this article is for you to have the same transformative experience as I had while writing it. That is to say, once I submerged myself in the depth of garden meaning, I was inundated by epiphanies and revelations of symbolic garden potential.
In short, gardens are revolutionary symbols of the sacred. They encourage contemplation, growth and expansion. The lessons they offer us is multi-layered, and multi-purposed. The only tool a garden needs to attain its maximum potential is us. Gardens ask for our hearts, our minds, our bodies and spirits to meet in a sacred space to actively grow in wonder and bounty.
Flowers and meanings have been the subject of conversation in every culture. Flower symbolism is endless. Their meanings range from protection, to love, to warnings, to wealth.
Get a more about flowers, including a whole list of flowers and their symbolism here. Symbols and signs in nature are so obvious in their presence among us — and so generous in sharing their energetic experience with us. Explore the power of nature and nature symbols here.
Share Tweet Pin It Share. Thoughts on garden meaning. Vegetable garden meaning. Water garden meaning. Rock garden meaning. Stone garden meaning. Avia in her own garden! Symbolic Flower Meanings Flowers and meanings have been the subject of conversation in every culture. Symbolic Meanings in Nature Symbols and signs in nature are so obvious in their presence among us — and so generous in sharing their energetic experience with us. You might also like. All of America, the "New World", represented this natural world at one time to many of America's original poets and novelists, a time not too long ago.
The symbolism of America as a garden is associated with the literary concept of pastoralism. It was developed largely in the nature notebooks of Hawthorne and Thoreau and in the stories of Washington Irving. It was this virgin nature of the American garden that Fitzgerald evoked at the end of The Great Gatsby when Nick Carraway says at the end of the book "I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors' eye - a fresh, green breast of the new world.
Written in , the book reveals the affinity between the conditions of life in America and the pastoral ideal. A Virginia planter by occupation, Beverley was motivated to attempt the book by inferior accounts he heard of Virginia while on a business trip to London.
His research took him two years and led to reviews of the early explorers of Virginia. The country, Beverley says, impressed the earlier voyagers as:. Streets are part of the city but roads are part of the country. Roads both connect and serve as boundaries. They connect cities and towns and they also mark the boundaries of the country, the boundaries of the farms, counties or townships. In a strict sense a road is not a place but rather something that connects places, a land bridge between two places.
But in the true sense, roads are a place for there is a certain place called "on the road" that all Americans understand. The urge for exploration, to travel over roads, has been the subject of numerous television commercials and popular culture and literature. One of the most successful television programs of the s was Route 66 which was about being on the road. Although roads have their practical purposes of connecting cities and towns together and marking country boundaries, they also have their mythical purpose of providing passageways into the heart of the country.
Roads are modern rivers which all of us can navigate and explore to the isolated little towns they lead to, the lonely little lakes, the canyons far away from civilization. They connect us between towns and cities but they can also lead us away from them.
Roads are created for automobiles but paths are created by and for pedestrians. They often connect with roads and run through wilderness. The word path also has a connotation of one's course through life as in the expression that he is following the "straight and narrow path. Trails have a symbolism attached to the settlement of the west. Trails such as the Oregon Trail were the first roads of America used by wagon trains of settlers moving west.
The word trail also symbolizes evidence that one leaves behind as in the expression he "left a wide trail" behind him. Gates, thresholds and doors are all symbolic entrances into new worlds. These entrances can be into a new life or they might represent communication between one world and another world, between the living and the dead. The symbolism between gate and threshold is very similar. The symbolism of a gate, though, suggests more of a protecting and guarding aspect while that of threshold suggests simply a passage from one realm to another realm.
Cooper notes this guarding and protecting nature of gates. They are the "protective, sheltering aspect of the Great Mother. Some of the symbols of gates Cooper observes are:. The 'strait gate' is the central point of communication between the lower and higher; the passage, in 'spiritual poverty' for initiates or at death, leading to new life. Like the eye of the needle, it symbolizes the spacelessness of the soul in passing through.
The gate is associated with wisdom Proverbs 8,3 ; kings sat in judgment at gates, probably as sacred places of divine power. Certainly a well-known use of the word "gate" is as the threshold into heaven and the passage through the "pearly gates".
Thresholds symbolize unguarded or protected passages between the profane and the sacred. Cooper points out, they symbolize a passage "from an outer profane space to an inner sacred space. Some of the better known threshold symbols noted by Cooper are the symbol of sinking in water, entering a dark forest or a going through a door in a wall. Together she and the garden restore his health. Virginia Woolf, "Kew Gardens" Available in Selected Short Stories , this piece observing four couples and a snail at Kew in summer as they move past a flowerbed resembles an animated version of a painting by Renoir, Monet or Seurat.
Rumer Godden, An Episode of Sparrows Godden's heroine Lovejoy is reminiscent of Hodgson Burnett's Mary, but instead of discovering a garden she creates an island of beauty, with the help of other local children the "sparrows" in a dingy London street in the postwar austerity era.
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