As I said in my previous blog 2 this blog relates to promoting a book I have written. Its original title was Three Gardens and the Quest, the quest being my spiritual journey, the essence of which I interwove as a thread running through the narrative, friends though felt that two subjects would confuse the reader and suggested that the spiritual references be deleted for inclusion in another book with spirituality as the theme. I did as my friends advised and I renamed the book, THREE GARDENS – Their design and construction, the front cover of which is shown below.
While obviously the book is a promotional aid for my company, it also promotes the landscape design profession by describing the stages involved in creating a garden from inception on the drawing board through to completion on site. It also refers to the origin of the firm in the early 1800s, its inspirational founder and subsequent owners and its progress to its current status in the Kingdom of Bahrain. The book is yet to be available for sale as I am looking into various means of publication.
From the spiritual aspect; as an aside, quite out of the blue, Christopher Butt, the dean of St. Christopher’s Cathedral here in Manama, invited me to give a talk about the spirituality of gardens, which I graciously accepted, interpreting it as the Spirit having been denied expression in the book in question was seeking another avenue. This was the talk I mentioned in my previous blog 2 in which a lady asked the question as to what could be done to alleviate the suffering in the world, and I answered Love. It was out of this answer that blog 2 emerged.
Though spirituality is largely absent from Three Gardens, it is not entirely so, for it is the power which motivates or drives me. My spiritual or invisible life is inseparable from my visible or physical life, one informs the other and vice versa.
As regards the gardens which are the subject of the book, in addition to being an expression of love; from a wider perspective, they represent the joint contribution of the client, the design team and the contractor in neutralizing the negativity in the atmosphere and by extension making the world a better place.
In future blogs I will be discussing these two aspects of our being, the invisible and visible, so until then…
God bless you
John
