Ground Well Counseling is a practice devoted to facilitating every person’s healing and agency. Though most sessions are focused at an individual level, social justice, healing and environmental wellbeing are essential components of the practice.
Nature and Gardening
Nature is.
“The wilderness isn’t locked into a power struggle with [clients], judging them, trying to shove something down their throats. It just is. No matter what happens out here, it’s up to them to choose the meaning” (Ferguson, 2009, p. 182). In experiential counseling, which includes adventure-based and nature-based counseling, nature and the outdoors can be just as important participants in therapy as the counselors and clients.
Gardens, of course, by definition do not exist without us (humans). But just as the wilderness is, the garden also is. The garden is not locked in a power struggle with anyone. The garden is a community of interconnected organisms doing their best to live and thrive.
Ferguson, G. (2009). Shouting at the sky: Troubled teens and the promise of the wild. St. Martin’s Press.
Gardens live in Cycles
…and so do we. When working with plants in the outdoors, you are inescapably connected to natural cycles of weather, seasons, growth, harvest, death, composting, dormancy, and rebirth. We can observe these cycles in the plants we tend and we can explore the metaphors in their stories for ourselves. We can also literally connect ourselves to the garden by eating the results of our care and work.
The Hoophouse
Gardens, as I said above, by definition don’t exist without us, but there are a myriad of levels of how involved humans are in any garden. That can depend on the purpose of the garden as well as the location. Here, in a community vegetable garden in Maine, outdoor gardening is extremely limited in the winter. Also, because of the short growing season, it can be a struggle to grow certain crops well (like tomatoes) or at all (certain kinds of herbs). The hoophouse, a metal-framed structure with a plastic covering, allows a lot more flexibility in weather protection, season extension, and growing a greater variety of crops.
I built the hoophouse using plans from Johnny’s Selected Seeds, with the help of some fantastic friends. Thank you David Reinheimer, Jeff DeBlieu, and Liam Cohen. Construction took over a month, and preparation somewhat longer than that. The gallery below shows the hoophouse in different stages of construction.
