Gardening has since ancient times been recognized as a spiritual pursuit, by amateur naturalists, Taoists, shamans, monks, nuns and herbalists. It mingles the spirit of the gardener with the "gardened;" it means allowing oneself as gardener to be "gardened" as one weeds and waters, ploughs and plants, to merge with the living world. It means yielding to a bio-centric rather human-centric point of view. Interspecies communicator and musician Jim Nollman puts it like this: "Gardening is a cooperative affair. I am a part of a neighborhood in which plants, dirt, rocks and a human family participate collectively in a love affair with place."
Unfortunately, city planners often forget about the love affair with place. They do violence to place through orgies of "development" and greenspace destruction. They forget that the job of the human residents of a town is to guard, honour and preserve the place which they share in a cooperative enterprise with the trees, shrubs, flowers, weeds, vines, mosses, grasses, insects, birds and animals that also live there. It is time to start communicating better with the trees and gardens, time to start noticing what their whole being is saying to us. Do you think they want to die of thirst? Does the soil, which is alive (there are about 10 billion bacteria cells in a gram of soil) want to be paved over? How many buildings do we pack in before we judge we have enough?
Is this sentimental? Yes indeed. Who wants to live in a culture without sentiment? Sentiment is feeling, and "feeling," or sentience (for sunlight, water, shade, nutrition, attention) is what all living cells respond to and with. That is the common language among species.
Someone estimated that suburban Californians use about one third of household water on their gardens (I don't know the estimate for Victoria). Good! What could be a better place to use it? For what better purpose, than keeping the world alive?
A website worth visiting: http://www.interspecies.com/