The best book I’ve ever read about Feng Shui (that never mentions it even once) is called Gardening at the Dragon’s Gate by Wendy Johnson.   This 400+ page tome is difficult to classify because it is an autobiographical work that incorporates a treasure trove of information about organic gardening, garden design, soil chemistry, pest control, meditation, recipes and lists of resources for gardeners.  I admit there are parts of this book that I had to “slog” through a little, but once I read this passage describing an experience with her teacher Harry Roberts I realized that almost everything in the book has a relationship to the study and practical application of Feng Shui – I was hooked!

“Harry could be maddening in his insistence that we take our time, look long and deep, and believe what we saw.  Almost every Sunday for a year, Harry had us look north during our seminar class, across the well-watered beds of the vegetable garden and beyond to study the steep, blank wall of coastal meadow that rose up just outside the garden gate.  ‘What do you see?” he would ask us time and time again.  The eight or ten of us gathered around him for the class would answer “The trail of a deer disappearing to the west”, or “Signs of ripening in the purple needlegrass.”  Late one Sunday afternoon in early September I pointed out a faint trace of green under the dry brown grass of the parched meadow.  Harry exploded with delight, knocking over his camp chair and leaping to his unsteady feet, poking the still, hot air of that Indian summer afternoon with his jabbing crutch.  “That’s it!” he bellowed.  “You saw it!  You got it!  Now go mark that spot and we’ll direct you from down here.” (p. 31-32)

What Wendy had seen was the evidence of an underground spring which Harry had been waiting for one of his students to discover for 8 months.  Harry had been conducting an exercise in observation of the environment which was also the equivalent of a class in the Land Form school of Feng Shui.  A few months after identifying the location of the underground spring, the gardening students planted an apple tree there.  A whole orchard was planted in the adjacent areas but after 25 years none of the other trees survived with the exception of the apple tree planted with its roots in the underground spring.

Gardening at the Dragon’s Gate has inspired me to take a fresh, new look at the land where I live and work.  One of the biggest lessons I learned from this book is that if I want to understand what is going on in my garden I need to take time to observe without thinking about the immediate needs such as weeding, watering and pruning.  The best gardens are the ones designed with the long-term future in mind.