The Wheelchair Gardener. Bringing some wild back to life
Bringing some sense of wild back to a life. How a garden and a dog have helped to make some sense of permanent physical paralysis following a spinal cord injury. Discovering and reimagining a new identity, whilst trying to rebuild a sense of self-worth. No garden is too small to make a difference; it’s never too late to renew, restore and rewild.
“Look deep into nature and then you will understand everything better” Albert Einstein
Paralysis struck after being pushed from the top of a stone jetty on the shores of Lake Tanganyika in 2010. I had built a life and a business in the middle of the African bush, off grid with no road and no mains electricity for nearly twenty-five years. This life disappeared in the blink of an eye and I had to make sense of it in a mid-Wales council flat, having lost a way of life, a business and my intended future. I had to find a way to release the grip of the centuries-old ethic that ties our sense of self so inextricably to our work and the way that we appear in the eyes of others. The gradual development of a garden along with a dog, have been powerful forces in helping to adapt, rebuild and reconnect with life by looking at it from a different perspective. Living a life on two wheels instead of two legs.
“ A pair of wings, a different respiratory system, which enabled us to travel through space, would in no way help us, for if we visited Mars or Venus while keeping the same senses, they would close everything we can see in the same aspect as the things of the earth. The only true voyage, the only bath in the fountain of youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to see the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others to see the hundred universes that each of them sees, that each of them is; and this we do, with great artists; with artists like these we do really fly star to star.“
Marcel Proust. ‘La Prisonniere, In Search Of Lost Time’.
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The Garden
Gardens are about people. They are expressions of ourselves and can represent what we feel about where we live, and how we interpret and fit into that place.
The Garden through the year.
See how the garden progresses through every season of the year with numerous galleries.
Yazoo
My best friend and partner in crime. Learn all about Yazoo.
About Me
A brief tour of a life journey that took me to central southern Africa for over twenty-five years and how I ended up in mid-Wales as a wheelchair gardener.