The Healing Garden
designed by HRH The Price of Wales in association with Jinny Blom
For his 'Healing Garden', Prince Charles linked with former spiritual psychologist Jinny Blom to design a garden based on sacred geometry and ancient religious symbolism.
Ostensibly an orthodox medical garden, with hundreds of varieties of herbs and plants that have been used medicinally in Britain for centuries, its intention was to remind people of what has been lost in nature.
The alignment of the curving limestone path was based on a sequence of numbers which underlie many of the geometric structures found in nature, including the spirals found in some sea shells and sunflowers. They were identified by Leonardo Pisano, better known as Fibonacci, a 12th century Italian trained in Arabic and Hindu mathematics whose work has become a foundation of the growing study of sacred geometry.
A large hornbeam tree acted as a focal point to the garden, but was, in symbolic terms, the "axis mundi" - the ancient, symbolic centre of the world that makes possible communication between heaven, earth and the underworld.
The garden was on three levels, suggesting the separation of earth, heaven and the underworld. It was bound by a hawthorn hedge, a symbol of fecundity and the coming of spring.
