Mindful Gardening Newsletter No 49

Tending the Garden Within: A Season of Growth, Grace, and Renewal

Welcome to another edition of Mindful Gardening newsletter. It’s been a mixed week of weather but there are sure signs that spring is beginning to unfold. Each morning as I walk down the path into the garden to feed the birds there are tulips, aconite, hellebore, daffodils, crocus, aquilegia and more popping their heads above the ground.

In this week’s Mindful Gardening Newsletter, I share the following invitations.

• The Garden as a Reflection of Inner Growth – Gardening is not just about cultivating plants, but about tending to the soul, embracing patience, surrender, and trust in life’s unfolding cycles.

• From Seed to Spiritual Embodiment – The daily rituals of misting seedlings, planning garden spaces, and rebuilding after storms mirror the inner work of cultivating grace and presence in our lives.

• Creating Sacred Spaces in Nature – Plans for a labyrinth, a chamomile lawn for meditation, and a garden festival invite deeper connection with the land and the practice of embodied spirituality.

• An Invitation to Cultivate Grace – This Mindful Gardening newsletter is more than a guide to growing a garden—it is an invitation to nurture beauty, presence, and deep connection in both soil and soul.

Seed Sowing Begins

This week the table in the living room is filled with packets of seeds. Most of these are for the flowers that I want to have bloom in this garden of grace. There are some that I am trying for the first time. There is the geum called oranges and lemons. I love geum but have in the past purchased mature plants. I love how they self-seed. We have some in Bridget’s Garden and in late autumn when tidying the bark walkways I find all these mini geums. I wait until they are a little bigger and replant them in beds.

I’m trying to grow Echinacea from seed. I made Bee guess how many seeds were in the packet. She started with one hundred and progressed upward. The actual numbers in the packet were five. These are expensive to buy as one off plant or even in groups of five or more so I will keep you posted if and when they mature. It’s all a learning curve.

The nasturtiums tend to be easy to grow if you keep the birds and mice off them. I have plans to plant these with the rows of Iris that will border the pathway into Stewart’s Grove. This idea comes from inspiration from the book I have about the artist Monet’s Garden where he has combined nasturtium and iris to beautiful effect.

The foxglove seed is so exceedingly small, but I love the colors of these foxgloves. There are thousands of seeds so I have sprinkled them in a small seed tray covered with vermiculite and will need to prick them out when their true leaves begin to develop. There is a huge sway of foxglove near the stream facing West which I intend to dig up and move to ensure that there is a wider display recognizing that this is a bi-annual, so it won’t flower this year as it did last.

Seed Sowing Techniques

I store seeds in photo storage boxes with labels for the months that they are first suggested you should plant them. While I keep the storage boxes in a darkened place (often forgetting where I put them) I am not sure how the clearness of the box impacts the storage of the seeds, some of which are in clear packets. We will have to see. I have one of these photo boxes for flowers and one for vegetables.

Another technique I am employing is to write the date when I purchased the seed packets because I never use up the whole packet (unless they are Echinacea). In this way I know that I am not wasting my time in planting seeds that might be two years old.

Tending to the Houseplants

I love having lots of houseplants around the cottage. It’s now time to replant them into bigger pots. Bee searched the polytunnel space and found several that will suit the move. We will be journeying to Enniskillen this week to find some ceramic or terracotta pots into which we can pop the plastic pots. In that way the pot and plant are more aesthetically pleasing.

The house plants will be given the added houseplant compost and some slow release plant food and that should see them settled in for another year provided we keep misting them or watering them as needed.

Other Happenings in the Garden

It seems that every time I walk out into a different part of the garden, I find another tree that has been blown over in the last storm. This week I found that the willow that supported the beautiful climbing rose gifted to us a long time ago by a Buddhist friend is now on the ground.

I have decided to bite the bullet and have ordered some safety trousers, gloves and helmet that are worn when using a chainsaw. I am presently researching the best chainsaw to use. I won’t be cutting down trees but only to use with those smaller trees that have fallen and need cutting up. These tend to have small trunks but are still too challenging to cut up with a mini chainsaw or reciprocating saw. The bigger trees that have fallen I will leave to others who know what to do.

We took some friends for lunch at Ardcarne Garden Centre on Sunday. They have lovely displays of flower combinations which make me feel a little envious, but which give me some brilliant design ideas. At the front entrance they have a combination of various colored hellebore combined with the glorious green and yellow of Japanese Hakone Grass or Japanese Forest Grass. So, I had to buy another hellebore to expand the two or three that I have growing on the east side of the path leading into the garden. Now I know that I will be looking for some mature Hakone Grass or Japanese Forest Grass.

The Incubation Room

Sorry for the poor quality image

At this time of year there is a lot of seed sowing and so the back bedroom becomes the incubation room where there are trays of sown seeds on racks and racks and more racks. The plan was to have a green house and a potting shed space for these, but the greenhouse got demolished in one of the storms toward the end of 2024 as did the Orangery.

The potting shed design is ongoing, and I have most of the materials other than a solar panel for the roof. This will be a job for myself and Lennon in the very near future. He’s busy wheelbarrowing tons of topsoil for the lawn that we are planting inside the surround of hornbeam hedging the planting of which got finished this week. Its great having him as chief assistant gardener. Unfortunately, Lilly (almost five) wasn’t feeling well this week, but we hear she is on the mend.

The secret of seed sowing is light, warmth and water. So, each day it’s one of my tasks to ensure that the seed trays are misted twice or three times and that there is enough light so that they don’t grow to the nearest light source and become leggy and vulnerable.

Spiritual Embodiment – It’s in the Cards

I got a late Christmas present from my friend Siobhan. This was a deck of cards that is titled Cultivating Grace. I love that title and it’s so appropriate because it is such a grace to be able to Stewart what I call this garden in Cordressagagh - A Garden of Grace.

I have other newsletters on my Substack Account, one of which is A Creative Life. This card deck will be a fun way of inspiring ideas for writing about the unfoldment that is A Creative Life. I opened this deck to have a look at the cards and found an instruction book with it. I opened the book at a page which had the title “Embodied Spirituality.” I just had to shut the book and put the cards away. I love the idea of embodied spirituality. Its really the invitation I share here in this Mindful Gardening Newsletters and all my other newsletters for that matter (Bringing Heaven to Earth, A Yoga Journey, and A Creative Life).

I will be developing the idea of embodied spirituality in 2025 by way of building the planned labyrinth, holding the planned garden festival, and developing the planned chamomile lawn that I will lie down on and practice yoga Nidra and take myself into that space beyond right thinking and wrong thinking (Rumi)

Out Beyond Ideas of Wrongdoing and Rightdoing

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,

There is a field. I'll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass,

The world is too full to talk about.

Ideas, language, even the phrase each other

Doesn't make any sense.

Translated by Coleman Barks

Conclusion - The Garden as a Path to Grace

Gardening is more than an act of cultivation—it is an intimate conversation with the land, a rhythm of tending, sowing, and waiting, much like the inner work of spiritual embodiment. As I watch the first signs of spring emerge in this Garden of Grace, I am reminded that every seed, every flower, every small effort made in love is part of a greater unfolding.

This journey is not just about the plants we grow, but about how we grow ourselves in the process. Whether through the patience of waiting for foxglove to bloom, the careful tending of delicate seedlings, or the resilience needed to rebuild after a storm, the garden teaches us presence, surrender, and trust in life’s cycles.

Like the seeds I mist each day in the incubation room, we too are growing—learning to cultivate grace, to embody spirituality not just in belief, but in practice, in the tangible world around us. The labyrinth I plan to build, the chamomile lawn where I will rest in meditation, the festival of the garden—all are extensions of this invitation: to live with intention, to nurture both soil and soul, to meet each other in that field beyond right and wrong, where only presence remains.

May this edition of Mindful Gardening inspire you to tend not only to your outer world but to the garden within. What seeds are you planting today? How might you cultivate a life of grace, beauty, and deep connection?

I invite you to join me in this unfolding journey—through this newsletter, through the rhythms of the earth, and through the quiet call of the soul to remember what it means to be here, fully, in this sacred and living world.

Tony Cuckson Cordressagagh Ireland