Gardening as Prayer

In this hot summer, there are different challenges in looking after our green spaces. Can Christians learn sustainability from the Eucharist?

Audrey Hepburn, an iconic actress during the peak of Hollywood’s golden age in the 1950s and 60s, and my namesake, is famously credited with saying, “To plant a garden is to believe in tomorrow.” This romantic view of the optimism, patience and hope required to cultivate life for a better future is now tested by the reality of climate change. Activists investigating environmental abuses, such as Mother Nature Cambodia, are imprisoned, whilst there are existential threats to Indigenous peoples with some of the most sustainable cultures, from global warming.

Southwood Gardens at St James’s encourages biodiversity. To me, this means not confusing nature with consumer sentiment and emotion. The human pleasure of a traditional, manicured garden can result in injustice and requires action to see the diversity that God wills throughout creation.

Church gardens are a textbook of daily prayer: at dawn, through the seasons and through the winter months, in darkness, waiting for growth and light in the spring and summer. But this visibility needs relationship and purpose. The garden has to be allowed to grow messy. Twigs and leaves can be used not just to cover the roots of plants, but also to allow insects and bugs to nest — creatures we cannot always see, but which are invaluable to ecosystems.

Soil is a living ecosystem. Scientifically, we know more about the cosmos than we do about soil. Southwood Gardens is a shady garden, but whether looking down at the soil or up at the conserved plane trees, there is breath, bugs, energy and interconnection — the Goldilocks principle.

As stewards of nature, we can employ all five senses on a single plant. The fragility of plants is reflected in human fragility, supporting mental and spiritual health. Plants have senses beyond human detection, as well as the obvious ability to photosynthesise, which all animals depend upon for food. What appears visible is deceptively common until seen with God’s eyes of life and creation as awesome wonder.

My main tasks in Southwood Garden are:

1. Composting — this is not about unwanted rubbish! Microorganisms, bacteria and fungi break down carbon-rich ‘browns’, such as dead leaves, twigs and paper, and nitrogen-rich ‘greens’, such as grass clippings and vegetable matter, into humus. This digestion releases heat, and the temperature is regulated. The compost can then be used in pots for plants.

2. Watering — the plant pots and saucers for bees and birds to drink from have targeted watering during this dry season. For pollinators, there are no weeds, only flowers with nectar, linking the life cycles of flora and fauna. All plants that have not been purposefully planted will hopefully, like people, find their space and time to flourish.

The borders, hedges and trees are what most people recognise as the garden. Being a green space within a hard-surfaced urban environment, many people within the St James’s community, as well as visitors and regulars, spend time there relaxing in its outdoor peace.

3. The grass — the four quadrants of grass, which had deteriorated over the winter months, were reseeded and diligently watered in March and April. Now, during the heatwaves, watering has stopped to conserve water. Though disappointing, the grass will grow back with the rains.

Before I came to St James’s, I used to pray everywhere. I still pray everywhere, but now I find solitude and silence to listen and contemplate while doing these manual tasks. Gardening is prayer, and God, without praying, is a privilege.

This is different from worship in church with community and Eucharist. The Eucharist and Jesus’s ministry, in a way, turn human knowledge and certainty upside down. Here you have, 2,000 years ago, God as flesh, sacrificed. Silent, distanced, humiliated and naked, caused by human power and abuse, creation still waits for us to return and understand that we are all one.

Bread and wine, the most familiar of food and drink, the body and blood of Jesus offered for our salvation and atonement, can totally transform human ideas of freedom, liberation and suffering. Maybe confusion arises because such greatness of love can be so available, free and humble, but beyond our addictive consciousness to gain honour, success and attachments.

Has humanity got the hierarchy of wholesomeness upturned, with nourishment in the Eucharist being more sustainable because it is for-giving, an act of thanks-giving and represents Christian unity? In this present age of polycrisis, where money and power are idolised rather than used as tools, green spaces can be used to halt us sleepwalking into automatons.

The Eucharist is the ritual fulfilment of the Scriptures in us, ‘named and loved’. In the Scriptures, there are many references to gardens — for example, Eden, Gethsemane and Easter Sunday — but these, in their apparent rejection of hope, are turned around to joy in the resurrection. Jesus used many parables about seeds, vines and wheat to encourage us to see beyond the obvious into faith.

We are our environment, but our environment is more than us: ‘Though we are many, we are one body, because we all share in one bread.’