THE MEDICINE WHEEL GARDEN is a guide to creating your personal sacred space and filling it with plants and objects that will offer pleasure and renewal. With American Indian medicine wheels as foundation and inspiration, this book aims to open a new door to garden design that is ancient and modern, healing and spiritual, simple and sophisticated.
A medicine wheel is a central circle, spiral, or cairn of stones from which lines of other stones radiate, often as “spokes” to an outer circle of stones. Since ancient times, American Indians have created many such arrangements of stones and held them sacred. Planted with healing herbs, the sacred space of a medicine wheel can also become a special kind of garden: a private ecosystem and a small sanctuary for the birds, butterflies, and animals whose natural wild spaces are at risk. Or the medicine wheel garden can take a larger form as a unique community area or even an outdoor classroom.
The creation of sacred space—how we set apart and arrange a certain spot and imbue it with reverent feelings—is at the core of this book. Whatever our religious beliefs, creating a medicine wheel garden outdoors or a smaller space in the form of an altar inside the home will enhance them. Both draw us closer to nature and native peoples and affirm our personal ties with the earth. However we approach it, the medicine wheel garden can move each of us into new healing and spiritual realms.
My own lifelong interest in nature and Native American life-ways has made the medicine wheel garden a powerful magnet for me. Decades ago I visited my first medicine wheel site high in the mountains of southern Colorado and felt an amazing shift in my personal energy. This beneficial, clarifying experience was a “felt sense” not easily explained, yet exciting and unforgettable.
A few years later, the continuing force of this feeling led me to construct my own private medicine wheel beside a wildflower meadow, where I regularly spent time observing nature. This peaceful site beneath an old apple tree, set in a wild hedgerow near a quiet pool, was not planted with anything, although in time I did move in small patches of various mosses to cover bare ground in shady spots. I would go there daily to pray and meditate, and I would often come away with surprising new clarity about projects I was working on.
Amazing things began to happen in my little sanctuary. Deer and rabbits would sometimes come right up to me while I was meditating there, and curious songbirds always surrounded me. Large flocks of wild turkeys trooped through the meadow daily and headed straight to my medicine wheel.
I continue my daily visits to my medicine wheel to pray and express my gratitude to the Creator. I especially feel the need to “walk my medicine wheel” when I am troubled about something or having difficulty working out certain situations. As I walk slowly around the low central altar of stones, I ask for guidance, or healing for someone, or better understanding of issues I am not seeing clearly. In this special space I have received remarkable insights. I also walk around the outer boundaries of my medicine wheel in meditation or sit on the earth inside the surrounding ring of stones to contemplate a difficult challenge.
It was while meditating within this medicine wheel that the inspiration came to design and create a medicine wheel garden, planted with healing herbs. I later realized that I had admired just such a place many years before in Ithaca, New York, at the home of an elder herbalist. I suspect that the idea of a sacred space uniting healing herbs and stones had grown deep inside me long before it came to the surface of my mind. I have spent a lifetime working with native plants, both in the wild and in gardens, and for years I have taught courses in landscape design with native plants and healing herbs. I raised my two children on natural home remedies, garden foods, wild edibles, and herbal products. We often laugh about our many successful adventures shared with numerous friends and school classes. These are the resources that have shaped us into the healthy people we are today.
I like to think that my connection with healing herbs and native plants is in my blood. I come from many generations of farming folks in Tennessee and Alabama. My Scotch-Irish, English, and German ancestors settled in the early seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the Southeast. Some of them intermarried with Cherokee, Creek, and early Powhatan Indians, blending our bloodlines and strengthening our ties to the land and healing herbs. Grandpa Ferguson farmed the rich southern Tennessee earth and wildcrafted medicinal plants for early pharmaceutical companies in the Tennessee hills. He collected striped pipsissewa, mayapple, ginseng, and trillium, always taking care to leave enough behind to continue growing a colony for the next season. Grandpa McLemore and Grandpa Morris, on my father’s side, hunted and planted in the northwest hills of Alabama with a fierce love of the land that holds their relatives there today.
Generations later, of course, wildcrafting is no longer the same business it once was, because wildflower and medicinal plant populations have been sadly depleted. As conservationists, we must now protect endangered species and cultivate them in our own gardens, and a medicine wheel garden offers them safety and appreciation—the perfect design for keeping these precious plants close at hand.
American Indian herbalists have long followed this route, bringing wild herbs into favorable situations where they flourish and produce larger, dependable crops. Pipsissewa, bloodroot, lobelia, yellow dock, and other vital herbs for treating heart, liver, and respiratory disease seem to have been planted near settlements, as were trillium, cohosh, and violet for assisting with pregnancy, childbirth, and infant care.
Medicine wheel gardens are also places for celebrating and teaching. Some American Indians go alone to the medicine wheel¨for vision quests, prayer, and personal renewal. Others see it as a place to gather people together for drumming, fire ceremonies, and singing.
With my great affinity for these American Indian practices, I felt a growing impulse to help bring more medicine wheel gardens into being, to extend their use for teaching knowledge of healing plants, enhancing spiritual awareness, and cultivating a deeper appreciation for sacred space. I could see this idea developing into a movement destined to enrich our practical and spiritual needs. My energies in this direction have led to creating a medicine¨ wheel garden on the grounds of the Institute of American Indian¨Studies in Washington, Connecticut, and another beside the¨Herb Shop in the center of Sherman, Connecticut, as well as others at botanical gardens and on private property. The one established at the American Indian Museum has multiplied itself in true garden fashion, as many people have taken the idea and my¨plans and created their own medicine wheel gardens at group¨homes, civic centers, and other community facilities across the United States and Canada.
As we cultivate and multiply sacred space, we also honor our ancient native traditions. In the spirit of this understanding, many of my American Indian friends have shared with me their tribal wisdom and ceremonial ways, confident that the knowledge they impart would be deeply respected. Each of us can adapt special aspects of these spiritual practices without pretending to be Lakota, Cree, Cheyenne, or Cherokee. The sense of reverence imbued in a medicine wheel garden transcends specific tribal practices.
Benefiting to the full from these gardens does not require drawing on them to provide your own natural medicines. Rather, let the presence of select healing herbs enhance your understanding of their value, and feel comfortable depending on a health food store or other reliable source for medicinal quantities of these herbs as needed. Those in the medicine wheel garden can best remain there to contribute to the conservation and propagation of endangered species whose habitats are shrinking. Some selective harvesting from this garden may well provide for foods and health care recipes, as you will see in Part III of this book. However, the most important thing is to feel a close association with the healing plants.
The chapters that follow describe in detail the steps, practical and ceremonial, and the resources needed to design and plant a medicine wheel garden or indoor altar that best meets your personal goals for creating and using a sacred space. They also provide profiles of a wide variety of native plants you can choose from, identifying the healing properties, other uses such as recipes, and the soil/sun/water requirements of each. The cultivation and propagation requirements of each plant are also detailed, along with different varieties of medicine wheel gardens that could inspire gardeners in various regions of the country.
In this book I will lead you to some of the most revered American Indian medicine wheel sites and other sacred sites. My accompanying pen-and-ink illustrations are intended to make the wonderful native plants more vivid than words alone can hope to do and to emphasize and enhance the spirit of the book.
My goals in this book are simple: to touch some vital chords in each reader and inspire the motivation and energy to create your own sacred space, outdoors or indoors, alone or with others, for spiritual and educational fulfillment. I hope you will receive as much joy and satisfaction from your medicine wheel garden as I do from mine.