Gardens - On Lawns vs Lavender...

In the late 1940s, on Long Island, just east of New York City, a new kind of American landscape was being built. It was called "Levittown" - one of a few that would appear in the 40's and 50's, designed originally for returning WWII veterans, with affordable homes, solid construction, picket fences and identical facades.

But along with the mortgages came something else: lawn obligations written into property deeds. The owners needed to agree to maintain their grass to a legally determined standard. Absolute uniformity and conformity was part of the deal. That small rectangle of green grass, wasn’t just landscaping, it was economic strategy. It stabilized property values. It signaled order. It reassured the neighbours.

It’s tough not to pause there, but it's absolutely true. What began as a post-war gesture of victorious optimism became something closer to collective performance. The neatly striped American lawn was way less botanical than it was behavioural.

Garden, Yard and the French form - "Le jardin" are all linguistically, close cousins. They all come from proto-something roots that meant enclosure, or walled area. Spaces held betwixt hedges, fences or whatever was around at the time. Originally, a garden was not an expanse. It was a boundary. Places to enter, not for display.

Where the American yard stretches outward - visible, open, almost performative, the French jardin folds inward. Between those two gestures of expansion and enclosure lies a quiet aesthetic difference.

Not better. Not worse. Just different.

If the American lawn is meant to be seen in all its glory, the French garden is meant to be entered. A jardin is rarely a flat declaration of green. It is layered. Gravel underfoot. Box hedges framing space rather than filling it. Lavender leaning into the path. Rosemary brushing against your calf as you pass. There is scent before there is spectacle. Napoléon Bonaparte once called the English “a nation of shopkeepers” a short jab at commerce over combat. But if one were tempted (as I often am) toward caricature, one might say the French are a nation of gardeners. And that is no insult at all.

Often, in French gardens, there are stone walls, warmed (though not recently...) by the afternoon sun. Or hedges clipped just high enough to suggest privacy without secrecy. Le jardin does not present itself fully to the street. It reveals itself slowly. Historically, French gardens, even quite modest ones, were enclosed. The word itself implies this: a guarded space (Gard-en), a place held apart from the world beyond its boundary. Not hidden, exactly. But protected.

Where the American yard signals outward stability, the French garden offers inward retreat.

The lawn says: Look - I am so pretty. The garden whispers: Come closer. Neither is less than the other. Both grow from cultural soil as much as actual soil. One celebrates visibility, the other values experience.

In that way, our French jardins are less about control than about care. we only loosely choose what grows there, but what does, belongs. What doesn't serve the garden, no longer serves us. I know it sounds like I am channelling my inner Chauncey Gardener from the superb film "Being There", but that movie is so rich with satirical wisdom, I am totally down with it.

Gardens are great places for reflection. Even the busiest of us, or the most spiritually jaded, will admit to having had moments of refective bliss in a garden. It a bit of quiet, self-devotion.

Perhaps because they remind us that we can't force things to grow. It just happens.

Which brings me, quite naturally, to Soulstice. Because in many ways, what we offer at our Soulstice Immersions is not so different from what a garden offers its keeper.

A space set apart. A place where the noise of the wider world is turned down a little, and where what has been neglected or overgrown can be gently brought back into balance.

Not with a petrol-driven strimmer, agressive pruning or rigid design, but by a little passive curiosity. How does it look and feel when we allow some re-wilding. Some truth.

Let the gardens we grow be like the natural landscape of our lives. Let them rewild a little.

At our Soulstice Immersions, not everything needs to be displayed or labelled. Some things grow better when they are tended within a boundary of care. When there is permission for both seldf-cultivation and a little natural wildness. It's way less about perfection that it is about presence. You notice what is doing well, and what can be pulled because it just no longer belongs.

And in that small, enclosed space, somewhere between structure and wildness, something begins to return.

You sit. You feel it.