Rethink beauty to transform your garden and life

Image: Artem Beliaikin | Unsplash

Stare deeply into beauty, and you will see it exists to enliven and protect. It loves to be copied, to get into the patterns of how you live your life. I want permaculture to spread to the mainstream; enriching others’ lives like it enriches mine. If you design beauty into your garden, people won’t resist; they will want one too.

by Cecilia Macaulay

My kitchen sink is protected from piles of dishes with small vases of flowers, and the nickname ‘shrine of beauty and love’. My once-scary invoices now have fetching illustrations on them, and of course I companion-plant my edible gardens with blossoms and other surprises. Whenever I am likely to get scared, procrastinate, or pretend something doesn’t really need to be done, I start with adding a scrap of beauty, and watch as the energy to make things happen just turns up, all by itself.

Beauty can be something that advertisers use to make us feel bad about ourselves and our lives. But I have some hard-won good news: beauty is something that anyone can learn to generate. In my quests and travels, as my passions have come and gone, I’ve discovered that, with a bit of skill and attention, beauty can be made for free.

It can be assembled from what you have lying around already, from who you are already.
Beauty is an enduring, renewable source of energy, as valid as wind or solar, and will give you and your mates the power to do the unexpected.
If you are familiar with permaculture gardens, many words may come to mind, and ‘attractive’ may not be one of them. Nothing wrong with that – strength in diversity.

The thing is, I want permaculture to spread to the mainstream; enriching others’ lives like it enriches mine. If you design beauty into your gardens, people won’t resist; they will want one too. What you are doing starts to spread, the meme gets out. Neighbours co-operate, volunteers turn up, donated plants and goodies start flowing in.

The most exciting discovery for me is that beauty isn’t a cosmetic you slather on top of a permaculture garden. Permaculture attitudes and principles are beauty-creation principles.

Stare deeply into beauty, and you will see it exists to enliven and protect. It loves to be copied, to get into the patterns of how you live your life.
Here’s a handful of techniques I find instantly useful, for you to test out.

Make use of very old memories

What humans find deeply beautiful are those things which have helped us to survive through history, like the smell of a campfire, which echoes as the smell of warmth, safety and friends. When we’re under the dappled light of trees we feel a quiet peace and security, which is no surprise since that’s where our distant ancestors made their homes.

Replicate these lively forest elements when you create a garden, and watch what happens. When an outdoor table is on an exposed, windy patio, people won’t use it. We are drawn to covered and protected areas. We tend to be attracted to those elements that helped our ancestors survive.

Create families

Creating stable, exciting families is what I want to do when composing a garden. When choosing containers for a balcony garden, I stick to similar materials, colours or shapes, so that the plants have a visually stable and cohesive ‘ground’ from which to fruit, flower and do their thing. They just need to be capable, supportive and silent.
Be deliberate – don’t accept any mis-matched pot that comes your way; any spiky, looming plant that wonders what it’s doing there. Think about families. They don’t take in every passer-by, or it wouldn’t work. Members have a history and a future together, they understand and look after each other. They make up for each others’ weaknesses, and together, they have a chance at a stable future, at surviving.
Use similar materials, different shapes, and see how happy they look.
Sticking to a common heritage is one way to make a garden look good. Imagine an edible South American garden, with its exotic blooms, drooping with avocados and tomatillos. It can transport you to another world.
Here is something I marvel at – Nature has created nutritional and ecological teams. Plants that look good together also taste good together. That’s amazing. Even more amazing, these plants actually take care of each other in the garden, so that you don’t have to.
My Lebanese dinner of tabouli and baba ganoush used parsley and eggplant. Without the parsley in the garden, there wouldn’t have been any eggplant. How is this so? Well, in the spring I saw a dainty baby mantis feasting on the easy-to-eat pollen in the umbel-shaped parsley flowers. Without that baby-food to get him started, he wouldn’t have grown up to be the burley, caterpillar-eating mantis. I would see patrolling my eggplant leaves.
While common heritage has its benefits, a well-chosen mixed marriage can be even more productive. Having tropical Bougainvillea clambering over my balcony railings can created dappled shade for the delicate English garden it sheltered, while its thorns guarded against marauding possums. The hot pink flowers and the deep pink raspberries made beautiful music together.
I always avoided using black plastic pots because, well, they didn’t suit my theme – my ‘family’ of pastel colors and materials. Then one day I wondered if I was making my life narrow, dismissing them too quickly as unworthy. I reminded myself that in permaculture nothing is inherently right or wrong. Problems and upheavals are generally a right thing in a wrong setting.
So, to extend my boundaries, I gave myself the challenge of making the black plastic pots into the stars of the show, a whole new Addams-family type family. A Gothic garden theme was born in my back courtyard. They did great. They held black kale, black edible pansies, blackberries, eggplants, and lots of eerie mauve – lilly-pilly and rosemary flowers.
You could even make a white polystyrene box garden that is beautiful. It would take a lot of ingenuity, but it’s not impossible.

Respect the nature of each thing

Short squat plants look good in short squat pots. Tall plants need tall pots. When things are happy and fulfilling their nature, they look good. If you want to make a path with square tiles, you put them in a straight line, or stagger them, or line them up in an angular basket weave, but don’t force them into curves. If you put them off their horizon, they get dizzy, and no-one is happy.
Likewise, lining up odd-shaped rocks like a string of pearls looks awkward. Rocks want to be wild, they want to lay about with big rocks and little rocks, on different levels, as they do on the mountains they came from.
Just as you don’t force your tomboy daughter to do ballet, or your graceful son to play rugby, you listen to what materials want to be, and let them do a good job of being themselves.

Let go of things you don’t need

It will feel painful at first, but giving yourself permission to throw things away will change your life. You are not obliged to keep things that don’t fit your garden’s composition. Our brains often say, ‘I have no choice; I have to accept whatever I have been given’. But we are designers; not victims. We don’t have to listen to the little voice that makes us surrender to clutter and overwhelm.

Throwing things away is difficult, and the reason for that is hard-wired — an excess of stuff hasn’t killed many of us, but until only one or two generations ago, lack was our constant threat.

Tossing pretty new things into an existing mess is one way to improve your garden. Subtracting unwanted things works much better. It’s usually the soft-hearted people, the people who can see redeeming points in all the battered and rejected things that find themselves mired in garden clutter.
When you leave things you don’t like in your garden, you get numb to them, which is convenient. No decisions need be made, no action taken. The cost is, you get numb to beauty as well. To keep your vision crisp and appreciative, don’t force it to tolerate mangy stuff. Be brave, make the decision, throw it away. Fully feel the pain of throwing things away; this will be the last time you have do it. The flow of clutter into your life will turn into a trickle and cease.

Here is another re-frame I find powerful: ‘Just because it’s there doesn’t mean I have to use it’. The blessing is, once I get strong about refusing things in my physical surroundings I’m more able to do it in my mind and spirit. Just because an emotion is there doesn’t mean I have to act on it. Choice really changes my life and changes my world. If you can do it in your garden you can do it in your life.

Love each plant

It will feel painful at first, but giving yourself permission to throw things away will change your life. You are not obliged to keep things that don’t fit your garden’s composition. Our brains often say, ‘I have no choice; I have to accept whatever I have been given’. But we are designers; not victims. We don’t have to listen to the little voice that makes us surrender to clutter and overwhelm.
Throwing things away is difficult, and the reason for that is hard-wired — an excess of stuff hasn’t killed many of us, but until only one or two generations ago, lack was our constant threat.
Tossing pretty new things into an existing mess is one way to improve your garden. Subtracting unwanted things works much better. It’s usually the soft-hearted people, the people who can see redeeming points in all the battered and rejected things that find themselves mired in garden clutter.
When you leave things you don’t like in your garden, you get numb to them, which is convenient. No decisions need be made, no action taken. The cost is, you get numb to beauty as well. To keep your vision crisp and appreciative, don’t force it to tolerate mangy stuff. Be brave, make the decision, throw it away. Fully feel the pain of throwing things away; this will be the last time you have do it. The flow of clutter into your life will turn into a trickle and cease.

Here is another re-frame I find powerful: ‘Just because it’s there doesn’t mean I have to use it’. The blessing is, once I get strong about refusing things in my physical surroundings I’m more able to do it in my mind and spirit. Just because an emotion is there doesn’t mean I have to act on it. Choice really changes my life and changes my world. If you can do it in your garden you can do it in your life.

Image: Benjamin Combs | Unsplash

Balance each element

Having a balance of the five elements creates a sense of ease. Balance wood, fire, water, air and void [the Chinese five elements system uses metal]. Introduce fire from a portable earthen fireplace in winter and a citronella candle in summer. Water could be a goldfish pond in wooden barrel, or a joyful plastic bucket, or just a large bowl with a bamboo dipper. It doesn’t need to be elaborate.

Humans don’t like a confronting a wall of timber; they like to see airy space between each plank of wood. Look at the spacing in a forest and copy it in your garden. Use a hedge rather than a paling fence, or cover it with a forest of raspberries.

When you use the proportions found in nature, you feel balanced, as the Japanese know. It’s older than that. You can imagine our ancestors saying, ‘Here is my waterhole, my cosy cave, my hunting and gathering grounds, my clan. Everything I need is here, and I will be safe.’

Be resourceful

We can be tempted to think that we don’t have enough money – so we can’t have what we want and can’t bring our longings into reality. If you have less money, and you are a value-creating permaculturist, you will have more time, more community, more skills.

We can trade something we have for something we need. If you haven’t got a real-world community, quick, go and get one. Talk to the neighbours, host travellers in your home, create an epicurean study group in your garden.

More creative tips

Create space for human connection
Something that connects people will feel beautiful, like a nook to sit in and be together. If we don’t connect we won’t survive. Conversations you have in useful gardens while shelling peas have a very different quality from conversations had in yet another restaurant or cafe.

Foster beauty of spirit
Undesirables will pop up in your garden – a dead rat, an infestation on your plants. That’s when you say, ‘I’m brave, strong, creative, and I’ve got Google’. There’s nothing bad about ugliness, but if it stops you from doing your job of caring for people, earth and sharing surplus, well, that’s a waste. You can’t always have physical beauty. But beauty of spirit is available anytime, anywhere. For me, when I see people bravely doing as they decide, not as their emotions dictate, I feel I’m in the presence of beauty, and it always puts me in awe.

Allow for mystery and surprise
Beautiful gardens do the unexpected. You can elicit curiosity, then discovery, by creating winding pathways, hills with stepping stones to clamber and harvest from, little doorways into other worlds in your garden. Nature will do the rest of the choreography. She will send you garden pests, just to tease you.
Then she will send in new insects to clean them up, and you will be grateful. And sometimes nature will send you lavish gifts – an operatic songbird, a frilly butterfly, a waft of fragrance, and, despite whatever was happening up until that moment, you will say ‘I’ve changed my mind – being alive is wonderful.’

White is difficult
Gardens look best when they are nature-colored, and here in Australia, nature doesn’t provide big swathes of white. This dazzling colour is best when it’s renewable, as that’s the only way to keep it fresh and bridal: a white flower, a white, freshly licked cat, or a gum tree displaying luscious snowy limbs under rough bark. Man-made white is another story. Whether it’s a white fence or a bench, rain-streaked, that discarded bride will curse you every time you pass.

Humans are phototrophic and our eyes will zoom straight to white; so unless your compositional skills are excellent, it will unbalance your garden. Go to an art gallery to see how painters manage this colour and you might do something extraordinary.

Overcome (imaginary) limitations
Borrow your neighbour’s garden. Just go and capture it. Care for it, get intimate with it, share the harvest. She probably won’t even charge you rent. We are so funny. We feel we aren’t allowed to love things we don’t legally own. Being a renter also doesn’t count as a reason to avoid living in beauty. The plants you put in will be your friends, and will enchant your memories of those one-and-only years of your life. Rental gardens are a canvas to practise on, a university course to learn from. They will go in your folio as a permaculture designer, and other garden-making opportunities will open up for you.

If you and your friends do an impeccable job on one section of the garden, it might give your landlord the confidence to fund the rest of the project. But he won’t invest in your garden if you don’t.

Don’t worry about leaving it behind – we end up leaving everything behind in this life, and it’s better to have loved and lost than never to have had that garden at all. When you must leave, there is also the option of bringing your tried-and-tested potted trees with you, or giving your pet plants to someone you love. Gifts given when it’s not even birthday or Christmas have a special glow. The crisis of having to move an ecosystem can bring people together.

Image: Chris Yang | Unsplash

Beauty needs love

Bette Davis said, “A woman is beautiful when she is loved.” When a garden is regularly tended and gazed at, passers-by feel it – they know they are in the presence of something valuable.

Because it’s an ecosystem garden, there will be things not found in regular gardens: flowers gone to seed hosting useful insects, maybe useful weeds amongst pretty flowers, hollow logs, layers of life and life renewing. Amongst all this may be other signs of activity – skillfully made rain ponds, a convivial breakfast table, sculptures purchased from people you’ve met. This will communicate a liveliness, something rare, and in turn, lovable.

But if the weeds and dead flowers are accompanied by forgotten fruit on the ground, a fence half-repaired with blue string, lolly wrappers caught in prickly weeds, everyone can see ‘procrastination’ and ‘lack of love’ written up in neon lights – cheap, stuttering neon lights. While regular gardens take a lot of fertilisers, zone one urban permaculture gardens take a lot of gazing. Gazing so we know what’s ready to harvest, what bugs are eating what pests, and what needs our help. And it’s a pleasure, because this garden is our darling garden, and when you have a darling, you want to have your hands on this darling all the time, you want to marvel at the new beauties that each day brings. Imagine choosing a low-maintenance spouse, one you just walk by each day, then throw water on once a week.

To make this happen, put a table and chair there, and just start spending time. Breakfast time, or after-work happy hour time. Get a rhythm going, because the power of rhythm will carry you and your garden along.

Once love starts, it snowballs, and your garden will elicit more and more, polishing your character, and making you strong, smart and beautiful. So many things I didn’t know about myself were revealed to me though my guru, my garden.

first published 1st January 2014

– first published 1st January, 2014

About the author:
Cecilia Macaulay works as a permaculture designer in Japan and Australia, and runs creative guest homes in harbourside and inner Sydney. ‘Togetherness designer’ best describes the work she does, helping people rearrange their homes and re-frame communication, with the goal of creating a cared-for self and cared-for world.
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