Soul Gardening

Jeremy Naydler has worked as a gardener for many years, serving his apprenticeship in York in the 1970s and subsequently working in various gardens in the leafy Victorian suburbs of north Oxford. The poems gathered together in this volume stem from his experience of gardening as a labour that 'seems ever to bend itself back toward soul'. For him, all gardening is soul work, and these poems live at the interface of soul and garden, where inner experience finds itself reflected in outer reality, and where outer reality speaks of deep, often deeply challenging, inner experience. Ultimately, the work of the gardener involves not only ensouling the garden but also gardening the soul.