Trisha Dixon
Visual Artist
At the centre of Trisha’s home is her library. Not a small room, it’s packed floor to ceiling on four walls with bookshelves. A table runs the length of the space. Again, covered in books. It’s here at Bobundara where Spirit of the Garden begins and ends; with words grown from Trisha’s library, ideas grown in the garden and fertilized by the vast Australian landscape. It is a book that is soulful, perceptive and encouraging. For Trisha, gardening is not about the attainment of perfection or the honing of particular skills, it’s about cultivating beauty and curiosity, respecting the essence of a place, and engaging with the environment from a place of humility. Gardening as seeing, not just doing. She writes:
“It suddenly dawned on me that gardens possessing this elusive spirit of place are those where nature’s hand tips the balance, where our human touch is not the overarching imprint on a space.”
Often gardening is not about words, it’s about action. Putting language around concepts that are actually very hard to articulate, as Trisha has done in Spirit of the Garden, is really important work. It helps others, who may not be able to find the words themselves, to say what it is a garden or a landscape or place means to them.
Language helps us find meaning in our actions. “Those passages you read again and again for their perception, their clarity, and for their articulation of a new idea, a premise to be fully comprehended for the first time. Often something you have had in your subconscious, but which resonates so strongly when seen in print, expressed with the poetry of good penmanship”, she writes.
“Seeing the world through someone else’s words can be a way of deciphering and more closely understanding your own life”.
I thoroughly enjoyed wandering through Spirit of the Garden, with Trisha Dixon as my intrepid and delightful guide. It’s a reaffirming, wise and beautiful book that contributes to the evolving and ever-deepening dialogue between people, landscape and nature.
- This was part of the review of Georgina Reid, writer and the founding editor of Wonderground. Her prose and poetry have been published in books and magazines nationally and internationally. She’s the author of The Planthunter: Truth, Beauty, Chaos and Plants and lives by the Hawkesbury river on Darug land.
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Thank you so much to all the generous hearted people who have emailed me with such uplifting comments on how the book has touched their lives….so appreciate such kindness.
The National Library has sold out but I managed to buy nearly 50 copies from bookshops in Melbourne so do have a limited number if you would like one. $65 (plus postage $15). Please let me know if you would like your copy signed.
(Hoping National Library will reprint!)
Review from Horticultural Media Association:
Gardens and broader man-made and natural landscapes not only appeal to the senses of sight and sound but, as well known writer Trisha Dixon expresses in this latest work, it is also their feel or atmosphere that often has a lasting impact on those who view them.
Commissioned by the National Library of Australia, this book had its beginnings in Trisha’s own garden in the foothills of the Snowy Mountains. She says in her introduction: “ …. in a valley far removed from the helter skelter of the everyday world ….. I am firmly entrenched in this ancient landscape, in this valley gently enfolded by hills, with a creek flowing through.”
From her own garden, she takes the reader on a journey around Australia and a few other parts of the world, to those landscapes that have a lasting impact – a feel or air that captures the heart and mind and stays with you long after you’ve left.
The book features a series of written reflections interwoven with Trisha’s own photographs that explore the value in the spirit of gardens and landscapes and the different approaches taken in their design. Her message is the need to understand and respect the environment in our garden-making – approach nature with humility rather than a desire to control it.
This is a book that inspires while reflecting on what it is that makes a garden or landscape special, nurtures the soul and keeps it alive in the memory
– Noelle Weatherley