This article was previously published in One Earth magazine Image June/July 1980.

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As I look out the window at the Park garden, the trees are bending with the gale-force gusts of wind, and rain is pelting down—this scene following a morning of glorious sunshine. As I look over to the horizon, the sun is emerging again. Undoubtedly, we will have a rainbow or two, but perhaps first there will be a smattering of snow or hail. So it goes, on a rather typical late spring day at Findhorn.

How often we view our environment as though framed by the weather, and how often people have viewed Findhorn as though framed by the garden. The reality of devas and nature spirits, phenomenally large and delicious vegetables, and so on. But more recently, through the late 1970s, that framing has been somewhat replaced by one more oriented to a concept of ‘growing people’ through working with group process and consciousness. This change has perhaps been a necessary one, for the Findhorn of reality must be more holistically oriented to society and more viable when responding to planetary needs than the profound, though idealistic, image of the Eden of our dreaming.

‘That’s all well and good,’ one might say, ‘but what about the garden? Is conscious work with Nature still an essentially functioning and productive weft of the tapestry woven by Findhorn as it matures?’ A few facts might be useful. In 1974, the gardening effort was limited to one area, the Findhorn caravan park, and our total food production was located on one-tenth of an acre. By 1977, we were tending gardens at three locations, bringing over half an acre into vegetable and fruit production. By last year, 1979, we were working at five locations, growing food for our own consumption on over two and a half acres. During the time that our population has doubled, our commitment to land area for food growing has increased twenty-five times. Financially, during this period, we rose from a point of somewhat negligible production to £4,000 per year in produce value.

Our projection for 1980 is for over three acres in vegetable and fruit production, yielding over £9,000 worth of produce. Granted, this organic food production is only one means of measuring commitment to the environment but it is still a convenient lens through which to view the overall trend. This trend is not purely a statistical one, certainly, for the express purpose of our physical work with Nature is still as an avenue to explore relationship to spirit.

These statistics take on more life as one considers the individual locations and activities. The original Findhorn garden is a small postage-stamp-sized kitchen garden surrounded by extensive and varied ornamental gardens. Cluny Hill, including both the former hotel and Drumduan House, offers a small variety of ornamental gardens, with vegetable and fruit production coming increasingly within a technique of deep-bed planting. One part of Cluny’s gardens is even well-established in the spiral form of the Catherine Wheel design.

Newbold House is yet more diverse, though traditionally British, with a one-acre walled garden and more land on which to increase fruit and nut production, surrounded by many species of mature trees.  Away, 175 miles to the west coast lies Erraid Isle, of which we are custodian/caretakers. This is a more ‘total’ environment, in which community members and guests live very close to the elements which condition their lives there. Erraid has walled vegetable gardens, hens scratching in the yard, cows, goats and sheep on grass and moorland, and the sea provides a variety of fish, shell and vegetable foods.

Back to Findhorn for the last stop, at Cullerne House, an eight-acre property adjacent to the caravan park, which is a major effort to intensify our conscious work with Nature. As well as the couple of acres in vegetable production, there is a paddock for a few sheep and free range hens, a mature wood-lot of Scots pines, and ornamental gardens surrounding the house.

We feel that Cullerne could be the centre of the horticultural molecule at Findhorn, providing the base for a horticultural school which would draw upon and use all the resources past and present. This, within the vision of an environmentally balanced future, would move us that next step into more fully understanding the relationship between God, Nature and Humanity.

Within this overview one can see the diversity of life and work-styles that the horticultural effort at Findhorn represents. There is no allegiance to one particular technique of gardening, or to a singular pattern of life-style or diet. We are continuously striving, with more success sometimes than at others, to weld this diverse effort into a unified expression, through the consciousness which understands spirit and form within Nature as inseparable and complementary. Attunement to the devic life-stream and participation with the seasonal festivals are partners with growing the food and tending the rock garden.

Therefore the pulse of Nature is inseparable from the primary note which Findhorn sounds—yet it is only part of that note. The frame to the Findhorn picture is the Spirit which enfolds it, and our relationship to our environment is an essential commitment and avenue to the well-being of that Spirit.