True Vision

This car is inspirational – see how next week!

As all my regular readers will know, I have spent the last two weeks in South Africa building our garden of Hope. The journey for this project has taken approx. 13 months and in this time I have learnt a lot and experienced things I never thought I would. I re-established old friendships and made many new friends and in the process we provided the community of Freedom Park with facilities they could only dream of.
Along this journey I have met many people and notably two who are constantly in the public arena, Niall Mellon for his charity work and Diarmuid Gavin for his curly hair and tufted chest! Both of these men are visionaries, they push away the obstacles to what they want and go straight for it. This is truly inspirational and should be taken a lesson from which everyone can learn.
I find gardening is bit like relationships; the more you put in the more you get out of it. It is of course not that simple but there are many similarities. Plants are certainly like people, the better looking the plant the higher the maintenance, the smaller less attractive plants just manage to get on with it and nobody seems to even notice they exist. Not to mention the grumblers the ones that just never seem to get enough attention, their heads hang because someone’s not there to hold them up. The big difference is that we as people have the know how, the ability, and the tools to make things better but we are all too often too busy to do anything about it.
I have seen first hand that with a little bit of extra effort and creativity we can not only change our own life’s but also the lives of others. I’m not looking for everyone to go off on a charity mission but I think we should start to think a little more outside the box and into the wilderness. The world is spilling over with inspirational people, designing, creating and building things far beyond our imagination, yet when many people seek to build or improve their our homes and gardens they just seem to stick to the norm and settle for what’s on the shelf.
In my professional career I am always trying to push out the boundaries, this is not always possible and I often have to curtail my ideas, more often than not to suit budgets. This is a fact of life or is it? When I think about, it is not really the budget that restricts inspiration it is the budget at that time. You see we all want so much right away that we end up accepting most of what we want within our current budget. What if we just waited, a few extra months or a year to get exactly what we want just a little later? I know that I would be happier! And in truth I think that most of us don’t really what to accept the normal, we all seek to achieve something in our life’s, however it is only with effort and patience that we can achieve this. The rewards however are ten fold; I know that on the few gardens I have created on an open budget, they have been my best, because instead of thinking about money I was thinking of creating.
This is why TV gardeners have become so inspirational, this is why millionaires are so inspirational, they can create and do things that many of us only dream of, but we should realise that they had a journey too. We see them on top of the mountain, but we don’t see them climbing it. This inspiration has both positive and negative effects on our life’s, we are certainly inspired by what we see and then we get down because we can’t afford it!
A garden to me is always a blank canvass, I don’t see hills and valleys, restrictions or obstacles, or even think about how much!, I see an open space where flair and imagination can be used to create a wonderful garden. When I established the Garden of Hope project I had a vision of creating a garden where everyone could meet, greet and play, I spoke at functions and conferences all over Ireland and in South Africa how we would build this garden on a shoestring budget in six days. What I couldn’t speak about until now is how this garden would affect the volunteers who built it or the community who now own it. The volunteers who built it could never have realised its effect and in fact nor did I, but as a group what we did was build on inspiration. If I could inspire one person to create their true vision of a garden my mission would be complete.
Imagine the difference it could make to your life to have something so special that it continues to take your breath away every time you see it, from when you wake up every morning to when you go to bed every night, forever in your thoughts and dreams. For those of us who are lucky enough this is a person. Be inspired by what and who is around you to make your own life and others all that more special.