I love to get my hands and feet in the dirt, but if it were not for mythology, folklore and fairytales, I wonder if I would garden at all, at least with the kind of fanaticism and fantasy I apply to it.

My book, The Echoing Green (with photos by Valari Jack), is an exploration of how and why I step into the garden and stay there, some days from dawn to dusk. It is also an examination of those things past and present that make the garden a divine and interesting place.

The garden is soil and seed, water and work, and it is also ritual. Many of the world’s gardens are designed around legends and myths, spiritual and sometimes political. Some, such as Japanese gardens in the Shinto tradition, are linked to the founding of a faith. Loosely speaking, my garden is too.

The Earth, it’s often said, is a garden, and gardening affirms that Nature is bountiful. The book is constructed of cultural memory, ancient to recent. Cultural memories – unearthed as cosmology, mythology, history, and personal experience – are every gardener’s lineage. It’s intriguing that we can each call on many worlds of gardens past and bring that much choice into our contemporary space, then make these ideas truly our own.

Cultural memory is quickly disappearing under the weight of television, shopping malls, and wanton destruction of Nature. Yet whether we realize it or not, each time we plant a seed, we are rebelling against materialism and the loss of Soul. We are preserving and nurturing an undogmatic energy and Presence, honoring that which is truly divine – Nature. A little bit with every seed.

Jennifer Heath is the author
of seven books of fiction and
non-fiction, including

The Scimitar and the Veil: Extraordinary Women of Islam (Paulist Press),

Black Velvet: The Art We Love to Hate (Pomegranate Artbooks),

A House White With Sorrow: A Ballad for Afghanistan (Roden Press),

On the Edge of Dream: The Women of Celtic Myth and Legend (Penguin/Putnam),

and The Echoing Green: The Garden in Myth and Memoir, including images by eccentric gardening photographer, Valari Jack (Penguin/Putnam).

Heath's writing has appeared in numerous anthologies, including

Why I’m Still Married: Women Write Their Hearts Out on Love, Loss, Sex, and Who Does the Dishes (Hudson Street Press)

and the Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature (Continuum).

She was born in Australia, grew up around the world, travels extensively and is the founder of Seeds for Afghanistan and the Afghanistan Relief Organization Midwife Training and Infant Care Program.

Jennifer Heath

email
HeathCollom@aol.com
 
websites
www.jenniferheath.com
www.taparts.org