MÉLANIe'S GARDENS

Techniques

When you stand in a space you would like to call a garden, tools at hand, you are at the threshold of action. You are where a garden becomes gardening.

Gardening develops where land, body, and tools meet. Techniques do not add a layer to the garden. They are where prior forces finally act together. Techniques are responses to existing conditions.

Whether you call them techniques, responses, or gardening, these actions originate in the conditions. They arise from awareness. Awareness of land, body, and tools is where action begins. Without attention, techniques degrade. What was once a sensitive response becomes a rote action, which loses sensitivity, then accuracy. In a garden, this shows. It shows through repetition.

Gardens are filled with repetition. Similar plants ask for similar actions. Seasonal patterns ask for patterned action. For a gardener, it is in this repetition of responses that familiarity is found. By repeating actions, we get to know them, where force flows and where friction arises. Techniques are not learned once and then refined. They are distilled from repeated action.

Repetition is not foolproof. Just as repeated action distills embodied knowledge, it can also reinforce friction. The difference is attention. Distilling techniques depends on awareness of feedback. Did a desired effect appear? Did it fail? What repeats is diagnostic.

This is where technique reaches its limit. It does not complete the garden.

Techniques are embodied knowledge. They do not hold that knowledge. A technique cannot tell you when to use it. 

That is up to you, the gardener.

Tools

So here you stand, in a space you would like to call a garden. Land is beneath your feet. You are settled in your body, accepting consequence. With land and body in place, you reach for a way of making a garden: tools.

Tools won’t make a garden, but a gardener without them will have a hard time. There is no pizza without a paddle. Tools extend our abilities, our reach, the force we can exert, our stamina. But tools do not choose their own timing, direction, or intent. The gardener does.

Even a great tool in hazy hands won’t do much good. It may even do harm. Tools enhance our bodily habits, aligned or not. The fit and comfort of a tool is not an optional preference. It is a limitation that guides our choice. When a tool does not fit your body, your body will compensate for its inadequacy. Uneven tension and fatigue arise, changing how we shape the garden by making room for error. You are the one using the tool.

Use will tell whether a tool is a good fit for you. Over time, its qualities become obvious: durability, versatility, portability, and, most importantly, your bodily tolerance for it. Brands may carry reputation. Specialization may promise narrow perfection. Novelty promises unexplored horizons. But these are structurally irrelevant. The question is simpler: does the tool hold up to your use over time?

Carrying, storing, and caring for tools sets a useful limit on your collection. Tools earn their place through time. This is not about avoiding new tools. It is about separating the ones that stay from the ones that do not. Some tools are ubiquitous and earn their keep through repetition. Others are for a single task, but indispensable. What you can carry, store, and care for will bring to light what truly earns its keep.

Tools will inevitably break, dull, and put strain on our bodies. When they do, they are talking to us. What broke? What dulled? What hurts? Our tools tell us about our relationship with them. When they are misused, they fail. And when they fail, they reveal.

Gardening tools take their meaning from use. Use takes its meaning from time. Time will decide what holds.

On Becoming a Gardener

About body, time, and learning to listen

I didn’t set out to become a gardener. I was on a different path, and became one along the way. What follows is not a change of careers so much as a change in attention.

When I was younger, I wanted to write soundtracks. I set out to be a composer. I studied classical music at a university. It was there that I first encountered a problem that would later shape how I understand work of any kind. My arms were in pain. I tried to play through it, but the pain increased. I was at a loss. I could still think of music, but I couldn’t make it.

My arms hurt, but they weren’t what my therapist treated first. Most of the work was on my shoulders, neck, and especially my back. At the time, it felt like a misunderstanding. But this was the moment the pattern became visible. Pain is not stationary. Symptoms are often caused elsewhere. If the back, shoulders, and neck never release tension, the strain of hours of playing pools in the finer muscles of the forearms. Eventually, the body can’t take any more and gives way at its weakest point.

My attention shifted.

Where is the body holding strain?
What is it compensating for, and for how long?
How do its parts relate to one another over time?

What I was told was this: stop everything. Don’t play. And because playing caused pain, I had little choice but to listen.

It takes a lot of piano playing to injure yourself. My pain came from habitual misalignment between my body parts, and from avoiding a return to neutral, repeated over time. Repetition was the amplifier. It had turned habit into chronic pain.

As I searched for a different way of being, I kept asking: when will I be healed? When will I recover? When will I be back to normal?

Then something shifted. The answer was this: when the alternative becomes the norm. When, through repetition, alignment is what gets amplified.

I now work in gardens with my body, for a living, a lot. I tend to it as deliberately as I tend the land, before work and after, preventatively and reactively. It doesn’t always look the same. I add new practices and set old ones aside. And if I’m going the wrong way, I have a reliable barometer. My body tells me quickly when something isn’t working, and I adjust.

Gardens are made with tools and techniques, but the maker, the gardener, is the one doing the work. And that gardener is someone with a body.

You.