Shamanic Gardening: Timeless Techniques for the Modern Sustainable Garden

by Melinda Joy Miller

A shaman is one who walks in two worlds, one seen easily by everyone, another seen with the senses of the heart, deep recesses of the mind, and within the collective spiritual consciousness.
Shamanic Gardening integrates sustainable ancient and traditional gardening methods with shamanic principles and modern permaculture. The practices, history, myths, recipes, and philosophies inside this book will enhance your relationship with nature, sustain the earth, delight your senses, and nourish your soul.
Shamanic Gardening includes a cultural history of sustainable gardening, including gardening techniques used by Cleopatra, the Japanese, the Pueblo Indians, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, and many others.
This book teaches both simple and advanced techniques to garden with more awareness and effectiveness, using your inner senses. Learn to design an elegant, edible, sustainable landscape, plant for nutrition and beauty, grow healing herbs and aphrodisiacs, work with earth energies and color, extract flower essences, and much more.
Melinda Joy Miller is a feng shui master, cultural anthropologist, medicine woman, and Keeper of the Medicine Wheel of Peace teachings of the Senecas. She has been practicing and teaching permaculture techniques and shamanic healing for over thirty years.

Genres: Gardening, Nonfiction, Environment, Spirituality, Nature

244 pages, Paperback

First published December 25, 2012

Reviews

[Fam]

Felt extremely orientalist. This is basically shittier zen garden advice.

Read this: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ja...

And this: https://japanesegardening.org/handboo...

Same thing. But much better.

I don’t care much about somebody feeling energy through gardening. If you feel that much about it, somebody please listen to an indigenous voice and read Gathering Moss or Braiding Sweetgrass.

[Ercilia Delancer]

This book turned out to be a disjointed collection of snippets from other gardening books I had read already. It bothers me to no end to pick up a book about gardening thinking the author is going to expound on their personal experience practicing the style of gardening they preach, only to find no specific examples of how they go about implementing their approach. The author would not even mention what part of Florida she's gardening in much less how these "shamanic" approaches have worked for her in that particular setting. The lengthy glossary of plants at the end of the book seemed like a filler since that wasn't the reason I picked up this book. Will be donating it to the library now.

[Alison]

This was a wonderful, inspiring book, teaching how to blend your spiritual path with your garden. While most of the plants mentioned in the book are for much warmer places (Florida), the methods, techniques and philosophy are easily transferable to any garden including my own piece of the Canadian prairie.

I borrowed this from my local public library, but it is a book I would like to add to my own personal library at home.

[Evie]

An interesting look at the more spiritual, sacred side of gardening. I appreciated the specific plant recommendations and cultural information, and will definitely carry over some of her insights into my garden next year.

[Noelle Dancer]

Two stars for the info on container composting and the companion gardening lists in the back, but really this book is a whole lot of fluff and little information on sustainable gardening.

[Cole Panzer]

Wonderful gardening techniques, wonderful guide to plants, really good description of historical and modern sustainable gardening, but if you dislike feng shui, this book may not be for you.