You can find more than solace in your garden. Especially in the morning or after a long day at work. In the garden, you can connect with your inner self and with the world in ways that you may have never realized. Your garden can become a dream world, a place of magic and mystery. Any world that you can imagine really. A garden can bring you back to a world long since forgotten; a world where the ancients believed nature spirits existed. Some still believe this.
Why? Because it has happened before and in inspiring ways. Take the Findhorn Garden for example. If you haven’t heard of Findhorn, it’s a garden in northern Scotland known for its large produce – including 40 pound cabbages to be exact and unusual flora growth – roses blooming in sandy soil in the winter. Three unemployed hotel workers – Peter Caddy, his wife Eileen and their friend, Dorothy Maclean, originated the garden. After losing their jobs on a snowy November day in 1962, he moved them with his and Eileen’s three boys to a meager caravan park with depleted soil. Not exactly the ideal place to cultivate a prolific vegetable garden and speak with nature spirits and devas. However, that’s exactly what happened.
With deep faith and hard work, they turned a hopeless situation into a garden eventually called the new Garden of Eden. In Peter’s words, “We had learned to surrender everything, including our wills to God.” (FH Community 3)
Eileen listened to an inner voice she called “the still, small voice within” and learned to speak with plants to help them grow in a dry, barren soil where almost nothing grew. Talking to the spirits in the garden, whom she called Devas allowed her and others to grow one of the most prolific communities in the world. (FH Community 37)
When Peter Caddy began working on the washed away soil behind the caravan they lived in, he found only gravel. The soil had washed away. He spent much of his time exchanging the two. Although it was back breaking work, he found the experience a very spiritual one. “I was told [through his inner guidance] that by working in total concentration and with love for what I was doing, I could instill light into the soil. My guidance took the form of intuitive flashes of inspiration—often received while working—that carried a sense of conviction, a deep inner knowing.” (FH Community 6)
The three often meditated together on their patio. According to Peter, “Then, like connecting up negative and positive poles in electricity, the energy flowed through me into the soil. This work was transforming the area and creating an intangible wall of light, like a force field, around the caravan.” They relied heavily on inner guidance from their source and many days meditated together on their patio, “Both Eileen and Dorothy wrote down the guidance they received each day from the God within.” (FH Community 6)
Peter believed Dorothy had the most significant connection with nature and to powers that the ancients believed. Dorothy claimed to be able to contact Devas, celestial beings who influence nature spirits in the structure and growth of plants. She communicated explicitly with the deva of a garden pea!
“We knew the devas to be that part of the angelic hierarchy that holds the archetypal pattern for each plant species and directs energy toward bringing a plant into form on the physical plane,” Peter said. “During my spiritual training, I had been made aware of the nature forces, particularly the ‘elementals,’ the spirits of earth, air, fire and water. To me, devas and nature spirits were an integral part of the creative process, the life force personified.” (FH Community 7)
Findhorn has been visited in the past by agricultural experts and has left them in a quandary. A well-known example is professor R. Lindsay Robb from the United Nations. He witnessed the unusual flora growing in winter and determined that only extraordinary circumstances could explain the garden’s anomalies. Many believe that, “a combination of love, talking to plants, constant care, and, most of all, an awareness of communicating to the spirits or cosmic consciousness guiding the growth of every flower, herb, vegetable, and tree in the community.” (Whitman 171)
The Findhorn Garden still exists today in Scotland visited by many who seek a deeper connection with nature. The Findhorn Community oversees the garden today.
Check out this film about the beginnings of the Findhorn garden.
I’m Dave Chappuis, the writer of Midnight’s Edge: The Spirits of Sleepy Meadows and 3 other books in the Midnight’s Edge series (available on Amazon by clicking here) in which I explore different realms and spirit worlds.
Citations:
- Findhorn Community. The Findhorn Garden Story. Findhorn Press. Scotland, UK, 1975.
- Whitman, John. The Psychic Power of Plants. The New American Library, Inc. New York, New York, 1974.