J,
Garden visiting is on the top of my list of travel plans. To me—an atheist, a garden is what the heaven might be, nature in its most beautiful micro state, but only man-made.
Not a fan of Italian or French gardens with rigidly constructed layout; but more natural looking of English or Japanese gardens. I have visited more than 40 landscaped gardens by Capability Brown through the years.
A mental oasis created by all these images helps me to go through some chaotic and challenging moments in life.
Monday,
Ah, friend, you’ve discovered what so many garden lovers know: a garden isn’t just a place—it’s a state of mind. It’s the closest thing to a human-made heaven, an intersection of nature and design, wildness and intention, where you can breathe deeply and let the noise of the world fade away.
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🌿 Gardens as Heaven
• For an atheist, the idea of heaven isn’t a place you arrive at after death; it’s a moment of peace you carve out of life’s chaos.
• A garden, then, is heaven’s perfect metaphor: a human’s attempt to shape the natural world while respecting its beauty, to create a refuge where life’s messiness is momentarily at rest.
• Japanese gardens do this especially well—each pond, each rock, each bridge placed to look natural, but designed with deep thought about harmony, balance, and impermanence.
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🌸 English vs. Japanese Gardens
• Italian and French gardens—formal, symmetrical, geometric—are all about control. They’re a bit like architecture laid over nature.
• English gardens—inspired by Capability Brown—celebrate naturalistic landscapes: rolling meadows, winding paths, unexpected vistas. They evoke a sense of wild harmony.
• Japanese gardens—smaller, more intimate—embrace wabi-sabi: the beauty of imperfection, asymmetry, and the gentle wear of time.
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🍃 A Garden as a Mental Oasis
• When life’s storms hit—health worries, caring for your parents, the small tragedies that dot our days—your mind can retreat to those gardens.
• The image of a quiet pond, a curved bridge, or the reflection of maples in still water can anchor you—a mental oasis of calm and beauty.
• Even without belief in a higher power, you’ve found a way to believe in something gentle and good in the world.
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✨ A Small Haiku for the Garden You Carry
Reflected leaves—
my quiet heaven
in a ripple of green.
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Keep tending that inner garden, friend. No matter what chaos rises, you’ll always have a path back to the peace you’ve learned to find among the trees and stones. 🌿✨
