Last Updated on September 2, 2024
We tend to think of gardens as places of tranquillity and rest. They’re where we go to escape the stresses of the day and the aggravations of the world around us. Your garden might be a getaway, or it could be where you go to feel renewed. All of those are valid.
However, the garden can also be the gateway to creativity and inspiration. How might this work? What lessons can a garden teach us when it comes to creativity, and how can it inspire us? Here are just a few ways that the humble garden can do this.
1. Capturing the Beauty with Photos or Paints
Perhaps the most obvious way that a garden can inspire creativity is the urge to capture our view and immortalize it. In a way, the very transience of the garden – the knowledge that this beauty will not last – is the inspiration that drives creativity.
The urge to celebrate the vibrant red or brilliant blue of blossoms, the myriad shades of green and brown, or the way sunlight dances on delicate petals through photography or even painting is something that everyone can relate to.
2. Natural Garden Art
You do not need to drag out a canvas and paints, or your bulky camera to enjoy inspiration in the garden. Looking around at natural elements in the garden can inspire you to create art in any number of different ways.
For instance, you reach under and flip a large green leaf to find a spider’s egg sack there. Pulling inspiration from this, you create a gourd nest for birds to enjoy the garden.
You could even work the gourd plants into your artistic vision, harvesting gourds when mature and using the climbing vines as focal points in the surrounding landscape.
3. Color Contrast
Another way that gardening can inspire creativity is through color contrast. You’ll find tons of contrast in the natural world, and planting contrasting colored plants side by side is an excellent way to create an eye-catching focal piece.
However, you can add more color contrast. For instance, differently colored Besser blocks can create visual interest and contrast with one another as well as with the plants that surround them. You can use Besser blocks to create retaining walls, or as definition between garden beds, and for many other uses.
4. Reflectivity
In the natural world, reflectivity usually comes from water – a drop of dew on a sun-kissed flower, or the sparkle of the sunlight on the surface of a lake. You do not need to resort to watering your garden constantly to enjoy brilliant reflectivity, though.
Polished breezeblocks offer subtle reflectivity that can augment the plants in your garden, peeping out from behind leaves and blossoms throughout the day. Pondering those delicate flashes of light can inspire both creativity and spirituality.
5. Supporting Native Life
There is little more inspiring in life than the beauty of the natural world. As a gardener, you know this intrinsically, but it goes deeper than just your flowers, shrubs, and trees. Using Besser blocks and breeze-blocks, you can create a garden that is ideally suited for supporting native life.
Stone surfaces offer purchase and warmth for small lizards, which will eat insects that could harm your garden. Using stone and concrete to build dividers and walls in your garden creates micro-environments that can support beneficial insects and attract other native life to colonize your garden.
6. Seed Germination
Perhaps the most direct example of how gardening can inspire creativity is seed germination. If you take a moment to ponder the process, you realize just how magical it truly is.
This tiny little package contains everything necessary to grow a fully mature plant, whether you’re planting daisies or thinking about how an oak might look in your garden. Seeds are incredible, and the analogy can be applied to pretty much every day of our lives.
Big changes begin with small things. Amazing things come in small packages. You don’t need to be big to make a real difference. Those are just some of the thoughts that a moment spent pondering seed germination could inspire.
7. Learning to Trust Your Instincts
Gardening can inspire creativity in many ways, but it can also offer other benefits. For instance, time spent designing, planting, and caring for a garden teaches you confidence – it helps you learn to trust your instincts.
After all, you can speak with expert after expert, read book after book, and consult magazine after magazine, but ultimately, your garden must satisfy what you want from it.
Your instincts in design, layout, plant choice, the color and texture of the Besser blocks used – those are what should guide you through the entire process. Learn to listen to your inner voice and you’ll discover greater self-confidence.
8. Slowing Things Down
If there is one thing that modern health pundits can agree on, it’s that we live too fast today. We try to cram as much as possible into every single moment of the day.
The result is that we live so fast that we don’t enjoy anything. The frenetic pace of our day to day means that we lack the time to savor any experience at all. Gardening can inspire you to slow down.
By simply observing the natural pace of growth and development, you gain inspiration on how to do similar things in your own life. If Mother Nature herself spends weeks germinating a seed and growing a slender stalk in order to bloom a handful of flowers, then you can slow down your own frantic life.
9. Root Yourself
We often think of creativity as something bright and fiery, flashy and bold. That is only sometimes the case. In truth, creativity comes in many forms, and nature can teach us the benefit of rooting ourselves firmly in our imagination.
Every gardener in the world is familiar with the difficulty of pulling weeds. Those long taproots reach deep into the soil, anchoring the plant against your best efforts. We can take that lesson to heart in many ways.
Not only can we anchor ourselves in our imaginations for better creativity, but the analogy can be applied to other areas of our lives. Rooting ourselves in our values, in our families, and in our communities, for instance.
10. The Abundance Mindset
Finally, gardening can help us change our mindset. We’ve been taught to have a scarcity mindset – there is only so much of this or that to go around. We have to grub after it to make sure that we have enough to satisfy our needs.
Gardening teaches us about the abundance mentality – there is more than enough for everyone. What gardener has not experienced bumper harvests of flowers and veg, and then felt the inner glow as they were able to share with other people in their lives? That is abundance, and it can do amazing things for your creativity when you make it your mindset.
As you can see, there are plenty of ways that you can find inspiration, creativity, and even spirituality in the garden. It all begins with a plan, though. We invite you to learn more about how Modular Masonry can help you design the ideal garden for your life.