An Avant Garden - Letting Nature Back into Our Lives

Nature has experience in creating stable ecologies that are beautiful, balanced and self regulating. Traditionally, western gardening has been a means of controlling, manipulating, and repelling the natural world. Today we still continue this pattern in our gardens and landscapes, yet we flock to our parks and remaining wilderness in ever increasing numbers to seek the natural harmony we sense is no longer present in our everyday lives.

As we learn more about the fragility of our environment and the need for regaining the balance between people and nature in our world, we are beginning to recognize the lessons that the natural world can teach us about living in harmony with our surroundings. We are beginning to bring our natural world and it's rhythms back into our gardens, homes, and lives.

Most of our favorite natural environments have little to do with gardening. Whether we long to spend time in a mountain top meadow, a tropical rainforest , a grassy sand dune on a stormy day, or in cathedral of redwoods, we rarely consider controlling our most special and spiritual places to better suit our tastes. Home, too, can be this kind of private oasis.

Avant Gardens are products of nature. In our gardens we attempt to develop personalized organic systems that nurture and maintain themselves. Rather than control and diminish nature with pesticides, fertilizers, and excessive weeding, Avant gardens employ the natural balances created in our environment and bring home harmony between plants, earth, animals, and people. A naturally balanced garden is in itself a living organism.

The many needs of people and their natural environment need not be conflicting. A garden can provide the many things that modern people need without becoming consuming sponges of time, energy and money. It can also meet the needs of a natural world under ever increasing pressure from humans. To do all this, we need the forces of nature more than ever as our ally and our friend.