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The Healing Garden
Running beside Zoie's Garden
Gallery, a trickling stream reminds
artist Nancy Endres to listen to
what her garden is telling her.
Listening to the Land
(Originally Published July/August 2007)
The land speaks to Nancy Endres.
When she learned how to pay attention to what it was telling her, the messages became surprisingly clear: Slow down. Look. Smell. Enjoy. Don't worry. Trust yourself.
For Nancy, the land also teaches how inner darkness can be transformed into outer beauty. How going outside into nature can actually bring you inside yourself. "There are forces that direct us if we just can be still enough and listen," Nancy says. "Everyone has this gift."
It was a gift she didn't recognize until about five years ago. During the first 20 years that she and her husband, Stephen, lived on their wooded five-acre lot in South Haven, Michigan, their yard was a playground for their three daughters. Every winter, a natural indentation was flooded to make a skating rink. In summers, the girls and their dogs romped on the lawn encircled by mature pines and maples. But when her daughters left home, Nancy realized it was time to return to her passions for painting, sculpture and gardening.
Nancy busily dug beds and berms to fill with ferns, hostas, conifers, lilies, hydrangeas and more. From nearby quarries (where she became known as "the rock lady") she dragged in literally tons of granite rocks, and she scoured nearby Lake Michigan beaches for driftwood and shells, some of which she formed into an abstract cross hidden along a garden path in the woods. Paths of grass and stone linked smaller spaces she carved into the land.
As the beauty emerged, Nancy started thinking of it not as her garden, but as Zoie's Garden (zoie is the Greek word for life). Something beyond her own abilities was driving the creation of this beauty, she felt. The land itself was helping her in ways she had not anticipated. "I am one of many who have struggled with depression," she says. "The development of Zoie's Garden has been, and continues to be, an intimate healing ground."
