About
Psithurism Garden Design is run by Eve Lennard, Garden Designer and Landscape Gardener with occasional collaborators.
How you experience and feel in the garden is important! Our commitment is to provide you with a garden that is not only visually beautiful, but somewhere where you want to spend more time and reflects what is important to you. We enjoy working collaboratively with our clients, enabling them to enjoy the process of design and installation.
Eve holds a Diploma in Landscape Design, Permaculture Design certificate, Living Design Process, Organic Gardening Essentials and many short courses in design, plant uses and growing.
Our Design Philosophy
The process of garden making starts with listening and observing. Where those collaborating find the process interesting and fulfilling, alive even. There is trust. We recognise a garden as a personal, intimate space. A sanctuary. The space reflects what is important to the garden owner. How you experience and feel in the garden is important!
A successful design occurs where there is harmony, space for the garden owners and all other life that spends time there to coalesce. The garden’s special qualities have been revealed rather than imposed upon it.
Holism, good design is recognising the whole first, before looking at distinct parts. Our design process blends ideas and methodologies from Living Design process, Permaculture design and principles, Building Your World, amongst others. A process that is led with listening, observation, reflection and experimentation.
Each garden has a story of place, where does it fit within the wider context and ecology, what larger environmental patterns are at play. Story of place includes the garden owner as well as history, geology, hydrology, climatic conditions, cultural, flora, fauna, people and relationships.
We prefer the act of tending the garden rather than maintaining the garden. Gardens, move evolve and develop. Cultural ideas and expectations of what natural is, or what a good ecological area looks like is a tension the design has to grapple with.
The environmental impact of the garden installation and hardscape materials is a serious consideration, and we look for creative ways to reduce the impact of each installation.
Why Psithurism?
Psithurism (Noun) (obsolete) From the Greek word psithúrisma, meaning whispering. The sound of the wind, rustling leaves on the trees.
Our fascination with descriptive words on nature was sparked by Robert MacFarlane, the British nature writer, when he lamented the loss of nature words in the Oxford Dictionary back in 2015, which lead to writing his beautiful book “Landmarks” (2015) and in this essay here:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/feb/27/robert-macfarlane-word-hoard-rewilding-landscape
Robert eloquently describes the loss and its impact when he writes:
"Why should this loss matter? It matters because language deficit leads to attention deficit. As we deplete our ability to denote and figure particular aspects of our places, so our competence for understanding and imagining possible relationships with non-human nature is correspondingly depleted. To quote the American farmer and essayist Wendell Berry – a man who in my experience speaks the crash-tested truth – “people exploit what they have merely concluded to be of value, but they defend what they love, and to defend what we love we need a particularising language, for we love what we particularly know.”
