In My Mind’s Zen Garden

Creating A Meditation Garden

Today I took lots of photos of the backyard/garden, since the rains have stopped and it was reasonably sunny outside.

A while back I made a commitment to myself to create a beautiful meditation garden in my backyard. I’d been inspired by the meditation garden at the SRF Temple in Encinitas, a beautiful retreat and hermitage overlooking the Pacific Ocean where anyone can go to admire the garden or meditate on any of the meditation benches available there.

A Place To Sit and Meditate

I don’t have a plan as to how the design of this garden would look. Years ago we hired a landscape architect to design our whole backyard, and so we already have a design plan drawn, and half of the construction was done with the project before we sort of ran out of money. But the basic look of the backyard had already been achieved. It was just a matter of creating a beautiful garden.

Here are a few of my goals for this garden:

1. Have lots of flowering shrubs and perrenials, and maybe a few annuals in pots and in certain key areas.

2. I also want to be able to have lots of flowers available for flower arrangements indoors.

3. We have a large hill in the backyard between the patio area and the street. And this is where I want to create natural paths to walk around and start planting new shrubs and put some nice outdoor lighting to light the paths.

4. I’m also investigating the best placement for new trees that will allow more shade during the harsh summer months. So, I’m closely studying the path of the sunlight throughout the garden.

It’s been raining quite a bit here in San Diego and today was a pretty sunny day, the soil is still to wet and muddy to do any kind of serious gardening. So I thought I would take photos of the backyard to document the start of this whole project.

A Meditation Bench

The garden looks clean and fresh in the cool winter sunshine right now. Recently I received some money for my 50th birthday and I thought I would use most of that toward a concrete meditation bench. We dropped by a garden shop in Carlsbad and we found the perfect one that curves, to go into a corner spot. So that’s a very good start to getting this meditation garden underway.

Here are photos from today. A good starting point before Spring, so I can slowly document the progress that is going to happen in the coming months.

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