Vāstu in the Garden

The garden is where the cultivated house meets untamed nature. This chapter is the book's most reflective: the garden as a "walled paradise" that speaks the gardener's soul, a deliberate argument for keeping some wildness in it, a practical guide to laying it out by direction, and a vision of the garden as a sacred, even divinatory, partnership with nature.

The book's chapter-opener motif — a figure within a grid (p231).

A walled paradise

"Paradise" comes from a Persian word for "enclosed park" or "walled garden" — a haven from modern life's speed and noise. As its creator you decide what your Eden says to the cosmos ("Success!" or "Beauty"? sensuousness or sanctification?), and your garden should reveal your own balance of dualities — fire and water, brightness and shade, sparsity and luxuriance. Match that harmony and "nature will match and enhance it" (Svoboda ch.8, p231–232). Gardening offers rare constancy in a transient society — plants' very immovability gives a stability "far beyond anything the animal kingdom can imagine," a link between your past and your future. Your garden speaks the truth of your soul, so plant what you love: trees remembered from childhood, fragrances that evoke sweet emotion (Svoboda recalls the cicada-thrum of Texas summers as a "nourishing mnemonic"). Dedicate yourself to a plant and it may surprise you — the night-blooming cereus, or the cactus that flowered after twenty years of devotion (Svoboda ch.9, p232–233).

Civilization vs. wilderness

Here Svoboda parts company with Vāstu orthodoxy. The conventional view wants the garden "clean and tidy, free of weeds and decay" — a tamed microcosm — but he argues that this urge to impose neatness too often supersedes natural, organic cultivation. The ancient Vedic seers revered the wild rivers and mountains; only their town-dwelling descendants came to see wilderness as "primitively chaotic," spreading "civilization" outward from temple and palace and dumping their rubbish in the naraka ("hell") just beyond the settled border. An honest Vāstu student "cannot afford to sneer at a swath of wilderness" — for buildings come to life only after they feel the life of the land (Svoboda ch.9, p233–234). [modern: Svoboda]

So every garden, even the smallest, needs some primal, uncultivated nature in it. A lawn is "nature under totalitarian rule" (Michael Pollan); a garden is far superior — "a stage on which nature can pirouette," a go-between bridging unbridled nature and the "green desert" of the lawn, "a way to use nature without damaging it." The two questions every gardener must answer: how natural do I want my property to remain, and how cultivated do I want it to become? — answered by your surroundings (wild suits a rural county, not a conurbation). Let the outer skin of the garden be as feral as feasible; most of us in town must consciously pursue wildness to dialogue with nature (Svoboda ch.9, p234–236).

The garden as transition

The path from house to garden leads from civilization to its "residue" (wildness); make the transition gentle (a "garden room," trellised walk, or conservatory using the house's materials) — an abrupt one "fosters brusqueness, and consequent vāta disturbance." The generally accepted garden layout (Svoboda ch.9, p236–238): [traditional]

• More open space in the north and east than the south and west; the ground lower on the N/E, higher on the S/W, with the natural rise (or a built mound) in the southwest, which is also left freest to grow wild.
• Flowing water is good, especially in the northeast (flowing west→east or south→north); pools welcome in the NE but not so large as to upstage the house. Water behind the house (SW) destabilizes the property; stagnant water anywhere stagnates prāṇa.
• Tall trees on the south and west (to block the afternoon sun and cool the house, but not so close their roots reach the foundations).
• A grill or, better, an open fire pit in the southeast — a focal point to sit, contemplate, and plan (good even unlit, especially if visible from the house).
• Square or rectangular borders (internal paths straight or curved to taste — French/Mughal angular, Chinese winding); a wall around it for quiet, privacy, and a clear boundary; a partly-enclosed garden seat in a private corner, and a meditation nook in the northeast.
• Plant placement: largest trees and bushes in the southwest; shrubs, grasses, and sacred/medicinal plants in the northeast; culinary herbs in the northwest. Keep the garden's central Brahma Sthāna mostly empty — at its bindu perhaps a globular mirror, a sundial, or a planter of tulasī (holy basil, Ocimum sanctum) or another plant that epitomizes nature's purity for you. (Grape, pomegranate, and fig are also said to benefit a nearby house.)

Trees

Trees have always been focal points for human life — for work, meditation, play, and affection ("hug a tree with openness and it offers relaxation and renewed vigor in return"). Vāstu texts give long lists of trees to favor and to shun: most Ficus are holy (specific species to specific directions), but other milky-sap trees are frowned on, as are thorny and stunted plants. The remedy for a forbidden tree that can't be removed is to plant an auspicious tree between it and the house. Where Vāstu's holy trees won't grow, choose a locally revered native (the English oak, ash, birch), ideally one whose qualities activate a benevolent planetary pattern — then weigh practical factors (mature size, flowers vs. fruit vs. shade, leaf litter, pollen, uses) (Svoboda ch.9, p238–239). [traditional]

The four sacred figs by direction: Plakṣa (Ficus lacor) in the north, Vaṭa (F. benghalensis, banyan) in the east, Uḍumbara (F. racemosa) in the south, Aśvattha (F. religiosa, the pīpal) in the west — each inauspicious in the opposite quarter (Svoboda ch.9, p241–242). [traditional]

The mystic garden

Letting wildness in turns the garden into a place "where divinity can come and jounce up against you" — the wilder it grows, the greater the chance of divine encounter. From the start, divinity summoned humankind to sacred mountains, springs, and groves; when people moved to cities they "took their sacred spaces with them in the form of gardens" (the Persian walled paradise; the gardens of abbeys, cloisters, and English churchyards — Svoboda recalls the 12th-century church at Upper Clatford, the chestnut-lined wall at Abbott's Ann, Winchester's medieval palace garden, and Oxford's Waterperry, "designed as a setting for meditation") (Svoboda ch.9, p239–240).

Because the Divine so favors gardens, Vāstu adepts advise performing auspicious rituals in the garden to invite deities and nature-spirits in (as at Scotland's Findhorn, where gardeners following the plants' "guardian angels" reaped rich harvests from poor soil). If invoking deities doesn't suit you, orient by the directions instead — Feng Shui plants a garden in the quadrant whose life-sphere it wants to boost (NE for knowledge, east for health, north for career); structured the Vāstu way, the garden strengthens the planet, doṣa, element, and guṇa of each direction. You can even use it for "divination by shrubbery": lay a Vāstu Puruṣa Maṇḍala over the garden, plant a bed for each of the eight directions, "activate" them with ritual, and watch which thrive and which dwindle — a bed that won't flourish despite attention may flag trouble in that direction's area of life. Well tended, the garden becomes "a vital, cordial co-creation with Mother Nature" — potentially the most important part of your dwelling, though you don't live on it (Svoboda ch.9, p240–241).