I read a beautiful little book about gardens.
It’s titled The Sound of Cherry Blossoms.
Except there’s nothing in there about propagating cherry trees, or even about the sound cherry blossoms make. The writer is a Zen monk and garden designer—Martin Habukai Mosko—and his book is about joining Heaven and Earth:
When we understand how to join Heaven and Earth in the garden, we understand how to transform our lives, work and environment into a field of dynamic balance and harmony. [We learn] how to live a meaningful and happy life.
At that intersection of Heaven and Earth is where I found myself a short time later: in the Waikanae garden of Vicki and Frank Boffa1. A beautiful, serene, remarkable place.
They call it their ‘slice of paradise’, which of course it is, but many, many (most?) gardens are so described, and the Boffa garden is in a class of its own. It’s just over three acres (1.3ha) in area, with two-thirds of that in lush, green, covenanted forest—kohekohe, karaka, nikau—with 1,000 square metres of pond, sculpted from what was once a boggy, blackberry-infested paddock, and now clothed in a profusion of native and exotic planting.
Martin Habukai Mosko says, while to some people a garden may be just a space with some plants thrown in, to me a garden is a refuge, a place of reverence. It is a place where spirit meets everyday life and in which there is the possibility of awakening and insight.
And, he says, water in a garden helps us appreciate that…
The ripples of daily activity do not change the qualities that lie under the surface.
You feel all this, winding your way through the Boffa garden. Perhaps Frank wouldn’t quite use Martin’s florescent language—might not say they set out to create a poem of a space—but he would, I think, talk about the spirit—maybe the mauri2—of the place.
If you love gardens and you have the opportunity, you must visit the Boffa garden. As T. S. Eliot wrote:
And the pool was filled with water out of sunlight
The surface glittered out of heart of light
At the still point of the turning world.3
And, further to previous posts, here’s another word to use (judiciously of course):
Stotious.
Irish dialect for drunk, inebriated.
Sinnot was stotious at the phone box on Tuesday.
Frank Boffa ONZM is one of the founders of landscape architecture in New Zealand: he helped establish the first course of landscape architecture at Lincoln College, founded Boffa Miskell, and was instrumental in the foundation and development of the New Zealand Institute of Landscape Architects.
(in Māori culture) life force or vital essence
From the T.S. Eliot poem Burnt Norton