By Thomas Christopher
When I spoke up at the recent New Directions in the American Landscape Annual (NDAL) Symposium, I spooked a number of my fellow participants. Toward the end of this event’s first day, I posed a question to speaker Elizabeth Kennedy. Kennedy is a landscape architect with a background in sociology, and she had just delivered a very interesting program about the intersection of nature and culture in her work. Her fresh and original perspective emboldened me to ask an unconventional question. I have become convinced, I told her that spirituality must play a role in moving the American public toward a healthier relationship with Nature; what did she think?
Spirituality may be defined in many ways. At its most fundamental it means striving for connection to something bigger than yourself, something that gives purpose and meaning to your existence. In the United States, it is mainly spoken of in connection with religion. Bringing religion into a conversation about humanity’s relationship with nature can be disturbing to ecologically based gardeners such as me, given the history of conflict in our culture between religion and science. I know I disturbed some members of the NDAL audience by following my question with a description of a conversation I’d had in late 2024 with a Franciscan Brother, James Lockman, who has taken as his ministry the restoration of wild areas disturbed by Caltrans, the California Department of Transportation. Brother James Lockman, who has a graduate degree in ecology, told me that the founder of his order, Saint Francis of Assisi, viewed the beauty and intricate grace of Nature as a reflection of divinity, and human beings as part of that order. As such, they defaced nature at their own spiritual peril.
Lockman also directed me to an encyclical that the late Pope Francis had published in 2015, which made a powerful case for respecting nature, while noting that because humanity is an intrinsic part of its web its communities, especially those in need, deserved to have their ecologies included in the concerns for the greater ecosystem. I told Elizabeth Kennedy that I am not a member of any religious group and that I would never urge a religious belief on anyone but asked her if she thought that spirituality could be a tool, perhaps an essential one, for reaching the majority of the population that doesn’t share NDAL’s commitment to ecological restoration.
Despite my assurance, a couple of fellow audience members told me that I seemed to be making a speech and worried that I was pushing the discussion into evangelical territory and would begin “shouting about God.” Clearly, I could have phrased my point better. A few other members, though, told me later that they found it thought provoking.
I have been involved, as have many other members of the Ecological Landscape Alliance, in pursuing nature-based gardening for much of my career, in my case since the late 1980s. My own understanding of garden-making has always been science-based. What I have promoted through writings and broadcasting has reflected that—I’ve been focused on landscape treatments that reflect a better understanding of natural systems and techniques that employ resources more sustainably.
I’ve been frustrated, however, by my inability to make any impression on the large part of the population that values nature solely as a source of resources and cares for it only in terms of its practical (primarily economic) value to people. A little more than a year ago I encountered an especially explicit example of that attitude when I spoke to a MAGA-enthusiastic acquaintance, the acting minister of a small church, of the supreme beauty of the natural world as something we needed to cherish, even when it offered no tangible benefit to us. He responded by demanding, like some anthropocentric Zen master, if nature was still beautiful when there were no people there to see it. I suspect that his opinion makes more of an impact on his flock than mine. And the membership of such socially conservative congregations nationwide is immense.
A historian will tell you that early religions commonly sprang from a desire to appease and live in harmony with nature. More recently founded faiths also not infrequently include elements of this attitude. I’ve recently learned, for example, that Islam teaches that humanity is just one of the creatures Allah created and that the creatures who are most beloved by their creator are those that benefit all of them.
But spirituality is not limited to the religious. My own early inspiration was Henry Thoreau’s writings. He was a close scientific observer, a proto-ecologist, and openly opposed to organized religion. Like his fellow Transcendentalists, Thoreau found his spirituality in the contemplation of nature. You’ll find the traces of this in the moments of whimsical exaltation preserved in his books and essays.
I have never forgotten, for example, Thoreau’s account in Walden of drifting about the pond in a boat, playing his flute to attract and entertain an audience of fish. Or his affection for the least loved landscapes in his community of Concord, the swamps. As a young man of 20 he wrote in his journal, “Would it not be a luxury to stand up to one’s chin in some retired swamp for a whole summer’s day, scenting the sweet-fern and bilberry blows, and lulled by the minstrelsy of gnats and mosquitoes?” And in his last publication, an essay titled “Walking” that was published after his death at age 44, he wrote that, “Yes, though you may think me perverse, if it were proposed to me to dwell in the neighborhood of the most beautiful garden that ever human art contrived, or else of a Dismal swamp, I should certainly decide for the swamp.” A similar strain of spirituality has often overwhelmed me with awe when contemplating some detail of woods and fields—or swamps.
Not all of us trace our commitment to epiphanies of this sort. Many members of this organization came to the work of restoration through a more pragmatic recognition of the disastrous environmental path down which humanity has chosen to proceed. I’ve found, though, too many members of the general public resistant to such talk. Sometimes they do not have the foresight or education needed to divine where our world is headed. Or they may not wish to change course because it would endanger short-term profits. They hope that a crash, if it comes, will not arrive until they have passed from the scene. Another factor is the widespread distrust of science in the United States. Why listen to the data-based warnings of environmentalists if you truly believe that facts are simply a matter of opinion?
We must convert more people to a less narcissistic attitude toward nature if society is to redirect itself toward a more sustainable and healthy relationship with the planet. The path through which we achieve this will be varied. Think of Robin Wall Kimmerer and the way that botany led her back to an exploration of her people’s, the Potawatomi’s, visceral identification with the natural world. Or of Terry Tempest Williams charting in her 1992 classic Refuge how her study of nature led her from her mother’s terminal diagnosis of cancer, which Tempest credits to exposure to radiation from atomic bomb tests, to a place of renewal and grace. These are the kind of powerful, emotionally accessible messages that can shift science-averse listeners from a transactional view of nature to embracing it as their family and aspiration.
As someone actively seeking out such messages, I would be very grateful to any readers who would care to share their own with me. For those whose interests are more pragmatic, who concern themselves purely with making our landscape ecologically healthy, I suggest they explore the tool of spirituality, one quite different from our studies and journal articles, but powerful in complementary, and I believe equally essential ways.
Thomas Christopher is a graduate of the New York Botanical Garden’s School of Professional Horticulture. He has spent the last 45 years designing and tending gardens. Although most of his experience has been in the northeast, he also gardened for a time in Central Texas (USDA Zone 8), where he was an active member of the Texas Old Rose Rustlers. He has also spent a good deal of time touring and studying gardens in other regions of the country and abroad.
Tom’s special interest has always been in the ways that gardening brings the practitioner into contact with natural systems, and the way that working with nature can make gardening not only easier and more rewarding but also an asset to the environment. In this era of environmental challenges, he thinks all gardeners need to consider this aspect of their craft. He is also the host of the Growing Greener podcast.