As a poetic extension of the human habitat, the creation of a garden is an artistic reconstruction of the time dimension and an ecological decoding of the spatial order. In the contemporary domestic arena, horticultural practice goes beyond mere cultivation of vegetation and evolves into a life ritual for repairing the rupture of modernity, constructing a transitional space between the material and the spiritual in a dialogue between the roots and the masonry.
The deep fascination of horticulture stems from its complicity with time. The dormant awakening of bulbous plants and the cascading growth of the annual rings of trees build a spatial and temporal coordinate system that transcends the scale of human life. Home gardeners can try to set up a ‘climate log’ to record the correspondence between the first bloom of wisteria and the height of a child, and the colour resonance between the yellow of ginkgo biloba leaves and the silver hair of the elders, to understand the interplay between the life cycle and natural rhythms. This kind of observation training can effectively enhance family members’ perception of non-linear time, and dispel the anxiety brought by the mechanical clock of industrialised society.
The nature-deficit disorder that is common among modern people can be cured by the tactile revival of inserting the hands into the humus. The ‘Blind Touch Recognition Method’ is recommended: blindfolded, one recognises the differences in the granular structure of sand, loam and clay soils, and re-establishes the connection between the nerve endings and the land through the fingertip’s perception of the water-holding properties of vermiculite. Clinical horticultural therapy data shows that the act of grounding by stepping barefoot on planting beds reduces the body’s electrostatic energy by 53% and cortisol levels by 28%, a primordial awakening of the body’s memories that forms the physiological basis for the family’s collective healing.
The Luo Shen flower planted by the grandmother and the plum branch grafted by the father are in fact the living memory of the family memory. It is suggested that an ‘intergenerational plant genealogy’ be established, incorporating migration history into the selection of varieties: the cactus in the Hakka’s courtyard and the egg plant in the Chaoshan patio are geographical markers of the community’s culture. When children recite the synonyms of the plants in the ‘Southern Herbarium’ in dialect, the linguistic and botanical roots are doubly anchored in the space of the courtyard, resisting the crisis of cultural aphasia in the process of globalisation.
Deliberately preserved dead wood stumps and broken walls covered with lichen constitute the narrative white space of the courtyard in the post-modern context. The biological art of fungi decomposing the wood, the life force of weeds breaking through the floor tiles, these ‘imperfect’ landscapes prompt family members to re-examine the dialectical relationship between order and wildness. The Japanese wabi-sabi aesthetics of planting broken tiles is precisely to stimulate the viewer’s completeness through incompleteness, and to glimpse eternity in the midst of fragmentation.
Under the survival situation encapsulated by technological objects, the existence of the family garden as the last autonomous territory where moss is allowed to grow freely is in itself a gentle rebellion against the modern logic of supreme efficiency. When automatic irrigation systems and handmade pots coexist in the courtyard, and when satellite-located gardening apps are intertwined with orally transmitted seeding proverbs, this symbiotic relationship between technology and human nature may be the key to reconstructing the wisdom of family ecology.
