Cultivating Sacred Space by Elizabeth Murray
As Heard on The Daily Gardener Podcast:
Cultivating Sacred Space: Gardening for the Soul by Elizabeth Murray
Published in 1997, this is a quiet and unusual garden book, less about what to plant and more about what a garden can hold. Murray approaches the garden as a place of private meaning, a threshold, a sanctuary, a living room without walls.
She looks outward to traditions that treat gardens as contemplative spaces, and to pilgrimage gardens such as Giverny and the moss gardens of Kyoto, where time feels slowed down on purpose.
The heart of the book is practical in its own way. It asks what creates a sacred feeling in a space. Is it enclosure, a hedge or wall that makes a garden feel held? Is it a path, the gentle insistence of moving forward even in a small yard? Is it a single object repeated with care, a bowl that catches rain, a bench placed where light lands, a tree planted for someone who is gone?
In late January, when planning begins to outpace planting, the book offers a different design question: not what will impress, but what will console, what will steady, what will remain meaningful even when nothing is in bloom.