Medicine Wheel Gardening Creates Sacred Personal Space

By Dottie Evans

A medicine wheel is a central circle, spiral, or cairn of stones from which lines of other stones radiate, often as spokes to an outer circle of stones.

––E. Barrie Kavasch

Author E. Barrie Kavasch is an herbalist, ethno-botanist, mycologist, and food historian of Cherokee, Greek, and Powhatan descent, as noted on the back page her most recent book, The Medicine Wheel Garden, published by Bantam Books in July 2002.

Currently working on her first novel, Ms Kavasch also teaches writing and creative gardening at Broadview Middle School in Danbury in cooperation with science teachers Ruth and Rufus Ayers of Newtown. She teaches writing and poetry at Escape To The Arts in Danbury, and she has created a medicine wheel garden with Broadview students and on the grounds of the American Indian Museum in Washington.

Despite her busy schedule and an imposing array of some 20 other published books, Ms Kavasch is a friendly and welcoming person who immediately puts a visitor at ease. Her home is a comfortable, well-built cottage perched high on a ridge in Bridgewater, and the view across the road over more than 2,000 acres of open space to the Brookfield and New Milford hills is sublime.

During a recent interview about medicine wheel gardens, Ms Kavasch briefly recounted the path by which she eventually came to live where she does, and she shared inspiration derived from the natural beauty surrounding her hilltop home. Her medicine wheel garden created on one corner of the property has been a source of deep joy and inspiration.

“I’ve lived in Ohio, Kentucky, New York, and Connecticut –– and I’ve spent three-quarters of my life right here one mile south of Bridgewater village,” Ms Karasch said, calling that small, quiet town reached by a bridge over water “as magical as Brigadoon.”

“We get the most delicious wildlife coming through here,” she enthused, mentioning “hot and cold running bluebirds, several species of frogs, turtles, and butterflies.”

Many of these creatures stop to enjoy her garden that is laid out on the south side of the house where she can see it from a big living room window.

“It pulls in the birds and wildlife. I’ve seen whole tribes of goldfinches in the iris.”

Her garden is a personal sanctuary as well.

 “It’s a place to pray and meditate. When walking the outer boundaries, you can think about daily concerns or a troubling situation. It’s about feeling a close association with the healing qualities of the plants,” she added.

 

Tracking The Sun’s Path

When creating a back or front yard medicine wheel garden, Ms Kavasch advises homeowners to walk the grounds and “use your instincts.”

“You may not have a choice about where to put it. Trust your judgment. It can be tucked away in the woods, or spread across a sloping grade. A medicine wheel garden can even be dug into a steep hillside.

“You could place it so you can look down on it –– as from the second story of your house –– so you can observe it in all weathers and through all seasons. It can be grand and exotic or small and intimate, but it should suit your temperament,” she added.

As Ms Kavasch writes in her chapter on Ground Plans and Garden Styles, “the points of focus in a medicine wheel garden are the center and the four cardinal directions –– east, south, west, and north.”

Her own garden illustrates the suggestions outlined in her book. Yellow, red, blue, and white ribbons identified with the four compass points hang from the top of a peace pole that stands in the center of the garden, and the ribbons flutter and flap as the wind blows. Their symbolic function is similar to that of the Buddhist prayer flag. While sending out positive energy to all corners of the globe, they protect and enhance the surrounding space.

In laying out a pattern for a medicine wheel garden, one should find the four compass points and track the course of the sun and the moon across the chosen area. Then decide how large the garden will be by pacing and marking a diameter line. Divide the line in half and go to the center focal point. With a long cord tied to a central stake, define the surrounding circle by walking the perimeter and mark it with stones. The spokes of the wheel should follow the compass points.

An important aspect of a medicine wheel garden is that the gardener and others should have easy access when walking around it, entering into the circle and finding places for rest and contemplation. For this purpose, Ms Kavasch has placed several upright logs (she calls them “sit-upons”) in a grouping. The spokes of her medicine wheel are laid with small white stones and larger pebbles are laid along the sides to outline the paths.

 

Stones For Antiquity, Serenity

Ms Kavasch is a self-confessed “rock hound” as both her indoor and outdoor landscapes attest.

Small rocks and stones of every size and color have been lovingly set down amidst books and pictures, along the windowsills, and around the plant trays of her south-facing living room.

Outside on the porch rail and under protective tree branches, small gnomelike piles of stones have been gathered.

“Stones speak to me. I always had a passion for geology, and I like to use native stone like river stones and cobblestones. These are the glacial scrapings of southern New England,” she said.

Anywhere she is digging, she keeps an eye out for what the land gives up –– perhaps spearheads and projectile points.

“There was a hammer stone in my stone wall, and I once found a meteorite. It was very heavy. The more you look at stone, the more you hold it, the more you get into it. It’s hypnotic,” she noted.

Special large stones selected for her medicine wheel garden are positioned in a particular way as decorative elements or to suggest unique or benevolent presences (“I call them my rock people.”)

When designing a medicine wheel garden, the gardener should keep an eye out for such special stones, then decide about their placement –– being sensitive to qualities of shape, weight, and contour that bestow an inherent identity or energy.

Ms Kavasch’s garden, for example, contains a Mother Earth stone in the southern or nurturing sector, and a Grandfather Night Stone in the northern sector, which is the place of moonlight, stars, openness, and wisdom.

A cairn of prayer stones may be centered on the peace pole as gathered by the gardener over time or offered by others who enter the sacred space for the purpose of contemplation or meditation.

 

Native Plants To Nourish Native Species

A classic medicine wheel garden may include plants and healing herbs whose blooms come in the four cardinal colors associated with the four compass points.

For example, the east quadrant might include yellow or gold evening primrose, St Johns wort, rudbekia, jewelweed, or witch hazel. The south quadrant could have blue flag iris, blue lobelia, sage, or blueberry. The west quadrant might feature red or magenta cardinal flower, bergamot, and Echinacea. White or silver blossoms of clematis, sage, bayberry, or pipsissewa belong in the north quadrant.

“But don’t crowd your plants,” Ms Kavasch advised, give them space to breathe and grow.

Because a medicine wheel garden is a place where creative energy is gathered and shared, Ms Kavasch believes the whole family should be involved in making it. A favorite variation of this theme is what she calls “the Mother Goose garden” that contains parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme.

“Plan your garden keeping the children in mind. Honor their heritage, and let them bring their own special stones or meaningful items into the circle.”

Friendship gardens are another theme that she incorporates.

“I invite people to come and work in my garden, then to take plants home with them. They enjoy digging and being involved. It’s important to give back,” Ms Kavasch said.

No matter what form the garden takes, always remember the basics elements that give it life –– air, fire, earth, and water.

“You’ve got the wind and the sun and the soil,” she said, “but don’t forget water.”

“I’ve sunk in a plastic pool and a horse trough, and filled them with goldfish. Tree frogs, wood frogs, peepers, leopard frogs that are rare and gorgeous, green frogs, bull frogs –– they all come at various times of the season.

“I keep a bubbler going in the winter so the frogs and fish can go to the bottom and make it through to spring,” Ms Kavasch added.

Her parting advice to a new medicine wheel gardener was the following: Start small and then enlarge.

“Medicine wheel gardening is not competitive gardening,” Ms Kavasch cautioned. “It’s a way of working with the soil, cultivating it to preserve native species in the plants you select.” These, in turn, draw the birds and butterflies that feed on their seeds and nectar.

“Gardens should not be demanding and if they are, you’ve over-extended yourself. I know people who have moved away just to escape their gardens,” said Ms Kavasch with some amusement, while looking fondly out across her own garden to the fields, hills and woods beyond.

It is a place where she has remained firmly grounded, sending out her own unique pulses of positive energy over many, many years.