• Start
• Therapy
• Supply and Demand
• Vita
• Aphorisms
• Links
• Contact

Aphorisms

for Horticultural Therapists ...

At the horizon
every dream
is an island
looking for a gardener.
Wilm Weppelmann

No one belongs here more than you.
Miranda July

When the world ceases,
to satisfy -
there is always the garden.
English proverb

The garden is,
where the inner and the outer world
meet.
Novalis

They have no aches and pains,
they make no outcry,
and there are no anxious and troubled faces to comfort.
They just grow and bloom.
C.F. Menninger

Where ever you go,
there you are
Jon Kabat-Zinn

Therapy in a garden means especially,
to prepare fruitful moments
and to arouse
a living readiness
to make changes possible
Heck 1983

If anyone can do something for me,
these are my hands.
Psychiatric patient in Langenfeld, Germany

It is the garden
that makes the gardener.
Alan Chadwick

Everything is beautiful,
if regarded at with love.
Christian Morgenstern

Earth offers enough
for the fulfilment of human needs,
but not enough
for the fulfilment of human greed.
Ghandi

Two things we are not able to alter -
not the earth where we stand upon
nor the sky streching above.
Hannah Ahrendt

Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.
Lao Tzu

Completeness
must be kept at bay.
B.H.

You cannot develop something
without unfolding it.
Oberholzer and Laesser

Believe in those,
searching for truth and
doubt those,
who have found it.
Andre Gide

The major problems in the world
are the result of the difference
between how nature works and the way people think.
Gregory Bateson

Working with plants, gardeners experience
a sense of completion and fulfilled achievement.
This can be linked to the concept of «work»
in opposition to the endless loop of «labor».
Hannah Ahrendt, The human condition

A garden mediates,
between nature
and human made environments.
Ruth Ammann

Gardening may help
to experience limits
growth and hope
as well as transitoriness.
Konrad Neuberger

Inside the gardens of Hof Sondern
Human beings may be changing
May be learning, may be living, hoping
- Ever sober! Never stoned!-
Suffering patience..., waiting ...;
This you´ll learn here, in these gardens!
Manuel Toyka

Gardening can mean
harvesting in order
to clarify results
of a therapeutic conversation.
Konrad Neuberger

Growing
is a way of changing.
Konrad Neuberger

For one's health
it is necessary to work in the garden
and see the flowers growing.
Vincent van Gogh

There are no instant cures for life’s ups and downs,
but, rather, “supportive holds” that help us
put daily difficulties and annoyances
into proper perspective.
An involvement with plants can be such a supportive hold.
McDonald

Do not pursue the past.
Do not lose yourself in the future.
Looking deeply at life as it is.
In the very here and now, the practitioner dwells
in stability and freedom.
The Buddha

Remain sitting at your table and listen.
Do not even listen, simply wait,
be quiet still and solitary.
The world will freely offer itself
to you to be unmasked,
it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy
at your feet.
Franz Kafka

My life is not this steeply sloping hour,
in which you see me hurrying.
Much stands behind me; l stand before it like a tree;
l am only one of my many mouths
and at that, the one that will be still the soonest.

l am the rest between two notes,
which are somehow always in discord
because death's note wants to climb over -
but in the dark interval, reconciled,

they stay there trembling.
and the song goes on, beautiful.
Rainer Maria Rilke, Selected Poems, translation Robert Bly, Harper Row, 1981

Stress down,
like the pouring rain.
Smell.
The time.
Delicious!
Konrad Neuberger

Once the weeds get out of control,
you might as well head to the beach.
Charlie Nardozzi