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Figure 4-8 Layout of Garden
for their support and also a reminder to the regular visitors and users of the overall joyous nature of life. The groves spaced far apart also ensure calm spaces and corners for visitors wanting quiet.
The grove essentially places nature and landscape above human interventions and grand memorials and encourages small individual human gestures over massive ritualistic obligations.
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4.2 Dora Efthim Healing Garden
The garden, near Boston, is based on the Native American concept of the medicine wheel. The garden is divided into four quadrants, or rooms, each associated with a direction, a season and a character trait. At its centre is a Rain Catcher sculpture and ancestor stones, symbolizing wisdom. It is open to the public (Faurest, 2020).
“She and Cynthia Mayher, the Executive Director of Parmenter VNA & Community Care, for whom the garden was to be built, were firm in their resolve that the sculpture not be representational. I found it to be liberating.
It had been stimulating experience finding a natural bolder for the base. The challenge of saying something about healing and wholeness, in the midst of nature, without using the human figure literally, my thoughts turned naturally to the beautiful stones I had been studying for the past two years at the quarry in Rockport. Among the stones that held my interest were the cut and split remnants of the quarrymen's work. The three stones of Rain Catcher made themselves known to me. The stances of the individual stones and their gestures relative to each other seemed crucial to me and the slightest changes in the angles would make the stones look all wrong. I began to think of the stones as figurative. In this way I called them the Ancestors, hoping that the name would be evocative rather than defining.
Similarly, the words Illumination, Wisdom, Introspection, and Innocence carved in low raised letters on the granite edges of the pool are meant to be secondary discoveries to the garden experience rather than defining road signs to a single or limited interpretation.”
-Morgan Faulds Pike (Pike, 2020)
Figure 4-8 Layout of Garden
