A garden is only as good as the gardener’s self awareness.  If a gardener cannot intimately know himself, then he cannot enter the garden complete and free, able to see the needs of his plants, the proper portions and placements of things.  Of course, a gardener and a garden have a special relationship that is different from one who enters a garden simply to experience it. In this way, the garden becomes the means by which a gardener know himself.  So in the planning of my own garden I find myself able to buy seed, sketch plans, but not able to fully see what it is that is garden, which has been the expression of a one hundred year old woman from the past forty years, will be.  This was her space before it was mine. I suspect in many ways she must know herself better than I know myself!  So the garden must be an honouring of her, but also an honouring of me.