Thinking in Ligaya Garden #1

Now that the garden is pretty well finished and moving toward some form of maturity, I have lots of time to sit, think and observe and I’ll share some of these thoughts and observations with you from time to time.

I love finding new critters in the garden. Every one that says ‘hi’ means a new aspect in the net of diversity that I’ve established at Ligaya Garden and adds to the resilience of the ecosystem and that’s got to be good!

Every new critter I see reassures me that there’s one less species gone extinct out there in the big world…

When designing anything in life, I tend to dwell on Indra’s Net, even for something as elaborate as a garden. Indra’s Net is a concept I borrowed from Hinduism and is represented by an cosmic net where each knot is a gemstone that reflects every other gemstone in the net.

Taken further  one can look at the gemstones or the strands of the net themselves. It’s all about connection whichever way you look at it.

It’s easy to apply this to gardening, just think that everything that you plant or build must relate to other plants and structures (and yourself of course). Everything must influence, if not everything else, then as many things as you can allow it to influence.

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‘How will this plant affect the soil’?
‘Will this tree affect the neighbours’?
‘Does this doing this positively affect plants around it?
‘Will this one feed birds and insects’?

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I probably couldn’t do this on a farm scale block but in a little place like igaya Garden,  it’s pretty easy with a bit of practice.