With the garden season winding down or gearing up depending on your location, now is a time when many of us are getting back into the garden after some time off. I thought it would be fun to take advantage of the seasonal shift and start a community Grow Curious project that anyone can do, regardless of whether you have my book or not.

#growcurious30

Spend the next 30 days being curious about your garden. Each day, commit 5 minutes (or more) to cultivating awareness of the goings on there. Explore. Dig around. Look underneath leaves and rocks. Touch. Smell. Sit quietly and contemplate.

The goal here is not about forming judgements or using close observation to think about what needs to be done, cleaned up, or “fixed.” Try to set judgement aside and accept the garden as it is in the moment, flaws and all.

Who Can Participate?

This is something that anyone can do. You don’t even need to have a garden. You can use a little patch that you pass each day on the street, your neighbour’s garden, an accessible community garden in your area, a street planter, houseplants on a windowsill, the plantings in a city park, a fallow field, an overgrown parking lot, or a wild space. The point is to choose a growing space or multiple spaces and commit this time to gaining an experience of that space through careful, slow observation.

How Does This Work

I have posted a graphic at the top of this page as well as to my social media accounts that lists 30 words. You may post this image to your own social media account or save it to your phone for easy reference.

Each day, choose one word from the list as a prompt with which to explore your chosen growing space. Some words indicate an action, while others are open to your interpretation. I have intentionally listed the words without numbers so that you can choose a word freely on any given day, but you may also choose to do them in the order they appear.

You may choose to approach each day as a completely new adventure, or put the prompts toward a specific, repeated action. For example, you could commit to a month of sketchs or photographs, using the words as the basis for a daily artwork. Again, the purpose is to use this time to explore and stretch the limits of your curiosity and powers of observation. The form or forms it takes is completely up to you.

Grow Curious Community

Use a paper or online journal to chronicle your daily experiences, or post them to a social media account. Use the hashtag #growcurious30 to follow along with what others are doing or share your own observations. Beginning on Friday, September 22, 2017, you can follow my daily observations via my Instagram and Facebook pages.

I look forward to seeing what you find and discover in your garden!

*Alternatively, you can also choose to do absolutely nothing, and turn awareness and curiosity toward yourself by simply sitting and BEING in the garden. That would be a pretty great thing, too.

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Grow Curious: Creative Activities to Cultivate Joy, Wonder, and Discovery in Your Garden is a gardener’s creative activity book that follows the seasons from spring through winter. It is available here.