Your healing garden - after years of training a yogi can meditate deeply on a traffic island in the middle of a city. Healing gardens are so much easier.
Meditation Garden
You have just deliberately let the boss win an argument, and you know that even if you cut your lunch-break short you can't meet your deadlines. You'll probably yell at your typist when you get back, who is only trying to help you. Your wife wants you to hang a picture when you get home, and you know you'll knock chunks out of the plaster in the attempt.
Then you finish your sandwich, and lie on your back on the grass in the healing gardens in the park. You look up at the blue sky showing through the branches of a tree, with little wisps of white cloud. You breathe deeply as fragrances of roses, honeysuckle, frangipani, and others that you can't name waft over you reminding you that there is such a thing as aromatherapy.
As you relax and snuggle deeper into the spongy grass the birds begin to become used to you, and you watch them flitting from branch to branch above you. As you relax even more you start to realize that the sound of birds all around you is louder than the traffic noise. There is even a cicada making itself heard somewhere near.
You fall asleep and wake too late to cut your lunchtime short, but as you walk back to the office you realize that you can meet your deadlines with a small change that you missed when you were stressed out. The peacefulness and atmosphere of the gardens have done their magic on you.
What's so special about a garden? One thing is the atmosphere. Fresh air by a waterfall might have millions of negative ions per cc. Office air might have less than a hundred. Even a garden in the city should be somewhere in between.
Medicinal Plants
Herb gardening is another kind of gardening for health.. I wouldn't want to be without Aloe vera and Comfrey in my herb garden. Herb medicine is too valuable to ignore in my garden. Herbal medicine is probably the oldest form of healing in existence. But there is still another class of garden produce that can heal you.
Fruit and Vegetable Garden
My last garden, before I ran into water restrictions, was packed with healthy food. There was a pecan tree at the front that the mischievous black cockatoos vandalized by biting off the nuts and dropping them on the ground, which saved me the trouble of climbing a ladder. There were three monstera deliciosa (fruit-salad plants) loaded with fruit. There was a guava tree, a prickly pear loaded with fruit, a jube-jube tree, two fig trees, strawberries, half a dozen passion fruit vines, a tamarillo tree, two mulberry trees, a persimmon tree, an acerola cherry tree ( fruit are loaded with vitamin C most of the year) two kinds of perennial bean vines, four paw-paw trees, a banana tree, new-zealand spinach, silver-beet, chinese vegetables, pumpkins, comfrey, daikon radish, broccoli, beetroot, sugar beet, leaf amaranth, sweet potatoes, tomatoes...
And that was just what I planted. The weeds flourished and I harvested nettles, sow thistle, purslane, dandelion and other weeds regularly for my meals. Snails also found their way to my pot as I wandered round my healing garden looking for things to cook. Did I mention fava beans and sweet corn and the loquat tree and the ducks that tried to eat the snails before I did, and gave me enormous eggs and...? Everything helped to keep me healthy.
