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Easy trinity, with limitless permutations; Wild Wood, Meadow, Stone Focal Point.
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Meadow, Urn, Hedge, below. Classical trivium of Garden Design. A structure for adding more layers, if desired.
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Used at the front end of Garden Design it is a manner of thought toward your personal lifestyle, preferably, one you've chosen to make you a better person, at a minimum, a happier person. Within the larger context of stewardship toward Nature.
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Your choice.
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"Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and freedom." Viktor E. Frankl, Holocaust survivor.
Pic, above, here.
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Once I discovered what type of gardens survive for centuries, after studying historic gardens across Europe, it became obvious how to start a garden. Start a garden with how it will end. 'It matters how we arrive at our ideas.'
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The classical trivium turned thought & writing into logic, grammar, rhetoric. This isn't too small, for garden design, you can add more later. With the classical trivium you are 'imparted the 7 liberal arts of classical antiquity.'
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Pic, above, here.
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Going beyond the classical trivium, above. Easy to see, removing flowers, the garden becomes its end state quickly, meadow, hedge/wildwood, stone focal point. (Labeling the garden in design terms, above, canopy, understory, walls, floors, focal point.)
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It's important to have the language for a garden, to create one. It's important to have the history for a garden, to create one. It's important to have the logic for a garden, to create one. You realize this isn't about your garden. It's choices about your life. God almighty first created a garden. We all ate that apple. No choice in the matter, I want back in the garden.
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Having the vocabulary to design a garden lets your mind "...collect and analyze information and to draw conclusions based on that information; it demands self-discipline and instills virtue (the ability to do what is right despite one's baser inclinations); it produces.........think, understand, solve problems and follow through on a wide range of interests. It requires a student to examine moral and ethical issues. A classical education is multi-cultural in the best sense of the word. Because it takes history as its organizing principle, students learn the place of their lives, families, and communities in the broad landscape of human existence and achievement. It imparts skills and passion for thinking and learning that allow a person to teach herself for the rest of her life. Classical education is systematic and rigorous; it has purpose, goals, and a method to reach those goals." Noval Classical, from here.
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This is more than you wanted, but have included it, aside from living it, because it is how George Washington gardened, and garden designed. More than agricultural, more than elegance, he gardened to show his political, educational, and religious beliefs. Born into a slave holding family, what was the impetus George Washington had, to free all his slaves?
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Slaves in America are part of historic garden study. In Europe, for too many eras they had subsistence workers. Ignorant, I had to ask a head-gardener what that meant, "They worked for food. No pay, no housing, no clothing given. At the end of the day they return into the woods." Serfs were another layer of garden labor, not technically slaves, they worked for the manor house, were given a plot of land for their own to work, and could take those earnings, yet were not free to move about, they had to be granted permission to leave a manor's employ, which was not a given.
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End of serfdom coincided with the bubonic plague. So many were killed, there were few left to work the fields. Finally, after the plague, workers were paid for their labor. And, allowed freedom to move about.
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Historic gardens, which truly flourished after the plague, ca. 1400, took another turn after WWI, so many were killed the grand estates did not have enough laborers to keep their properties up to prior WWI standards. This is when 'my' trinity of historic gardens appeared. WWII was the macro end of agrarian gardens, and beginning of industrialized landscapes we have today.
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Industrialized landscaping parallels, unfortunately, global factory farming of livestock. Won't go further into that realm here beyond noting George Washington's gardening choices, and life choices.
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In the garden, beyond making design choices based upon a trivium, choosing to engage the brain in addition to body, spirit & community, there is the garden itself, with some life forces equal to ours. At times, appearing sentient, perhaps behaving with sentience.
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Does the neo-sentience of a garden affect our thought processes when in our garden, or woodland, or fields & streams?
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Garden & Be Well, XO T
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How do you like History, thru my Garden prism?
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From the Mount Vernon website, below.
In his will, written several months before his death in December 1799, George Washington left directions for the emancipation of all the slaves that he owned, after the death of Martha Washington.
Washington's slave census in this 1799 will and testament
Of the 317 slaves at Mount Vernon in 1799, 123 individuals were owned by George Washington and were stipulated in Washington's will to be freed upon his wife's death. However, these conditions did not apply to all slaves at Mount Vernon. When Martha Washington's first husband Daniel Parke Custis died without a will, she received a life interest in one-third of his estate, including his slaves. The other two-thirds of the estate went to their children.
Neither George nor Martha Washington could free these dower slaves by law. Upon her death the slaves would revert to the Custis estate and be divided among her grandchildren. By 1799, 153 slaves at Mount Vernon were part of this dower property. Forty more slaves were rented from a neighbor, while another man, Peter Hardiman, was rented from the widow of Martha Washington's son. All these people would eventually return to their owners.
In accordance with state law, George Washington stipulated in his will that elderly slaves or those who were too sick to work were to be supported throughout their lives by his estate. Children without parents, or those whose families were unable to see to their education were to be bound out to masters and mistresses who would teach them reading, writing, and a useful trade, until they were ultimately freed at the age of twenty-five. Washington’s will stated that he took these charges to his executors very seriously: "And I do moreover most pointedly, and most solemnly enjoin it upon my Executors...to see that this clause respecting Slaves, and every part thereof be religiously fulfilled at the Epoch at which it is directed to take place; without evasion, neglect or delay, after the Crops which may then be on the ground are harvested, particularly as it respects the aged and infirm."
In December 1800, Martha Washington signed a deed of manumission for her deceased husband's slaves, a transaction that is recorded in the abstracts of the Fairfax County, Virginia, Court Records. They would finally become free on January 1, 1801.
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