Wisdom's garden: lessons for Northern Ireland

My mother and her two sisters each made gardens in the lush Irish earth. The design, the choice of flowers, shrubs, trees, what they rooted up and what they planted, how they balanced decoration and utility, resulted in three very different compositions. Their patterns of selection and emphasis were not the same. Why, in a religious or political context, are we so concerned with the triumphalism of allowing only a single mode of approach, whereas in gardening we can recognise the value of diversity and rejoice in the fact that not all gardens are the same? Just as in gardening we might allow some basic principles universal application: don't deprive plants of water, allow sufficient light, nurture soil quality, so in our political or religious compositions we might let freedom of speech, or gender equality, or education for everyone, or respect for all life stand as fundamental principles. But beyond such basics might we not, in these early years of the twenty-first century, gradually edge towards a valuation that allows and celebrates difference? Rather than opting for any of the divisive mono-cultures of dualism's serried ranks of poisonous twins, is it not time to give our allegiance to the kind of creative diversity that gardening suggests, honouring the rich variety that stems from individual difference instead of trying to impose the uniformity of some aggressively singular ideology?

According to Russell Page (to quote again from his wonderful book The Education of a Gardener): 'A good garden cannot be made by somebody who has not developed the capacity to know and to love growing things.' Such a compassionate and practical prerequisite was certainly in place in my mother's County Antrim garden. It's time that we allowed it to superimpose its wisdom on our mind, such that its presence there might start to make a real difference to all those acts by which we create the world we live in.

Dr Chris Arthur is Senior Lecturer in Religious Studies in the University of Wales, Lampeter.

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