FUTURE DEVELOPMENT of Our MHG

COMMUNITY-CENTERED PEACE MEDICINAL HERB GARDEN

Vision: 

That every community has as a centerpiece a Community Access Medicinal Herb Garden comprised of 15 Traditional Medicinal Herb Gardens from the major cultural regions around the world, arranged around a Sacred Center Herb Garden.  These will include: Chinese, Ayurvedic, Arabian/Mediterranean, Persian, Southeast Asian, European, Native North American, Native Californian, Boreal Taiga, African, Latin American, Australian, Japanese-Korean, African American, and Mexican. These would provide for our acquaintance, education, inspiration and the opportunity to cultivate our traditional healing plants.

Each traditional garden would be facilitated and maintained by the knowledgeable peoples of their ethnic tradition.  These gardens will provide opportunity to teach traditional plant medicines using their own plants, and in their own language, thereby perpetuating their traditional wisdom.

With this diversity of World Plant wisdom Centers in one garden, the community gains the opportunity to learn from and come to respect the inherent value of each tradition.  The ensuing broadened and deepened perspective expands our consciousness and ability to cultivate an embracing and compassionate world view; one that is also ecologically respectful and honoring.  This Garden’s position and functioning as a Community Centerpiece, creates a Community-Centered PEACE!

Each Centerpiece Garden will also provide supportive greenhouses, research facilities, classroom buildings, medicine making facilities, herb plant sales nursery, a boutique for Herbal products sales, and a Tonifying-Tea kiosk with a large patio which also serves as a community education and social event venue.  These gardens in suitable climates will also include 55 medicinal trees, and will be encircled by 27 species of world conifers whose resins and filtering foliage act to sanctify the energy of the space.

There is a sense that once this Medicinal Herb Centered-Peace Garden Vision manifests on the ground, it will inspire every other community to create one as well.  Such a respectful Medicinal Plant presence will indeed transform the collective world culture!

Proposal:

• Bring together interested parties from local and East Bay ethnic communities, herbal studies, gardening programs and others to discern how we can create this Community Centered Peace Medicinal Herb Garden.
• Explore our abilities to jointly sponsor, fund, and create this garden facility that we need.
• Jointly support the management of this garden through Non-profit status, a committed directorship, and assisting internships from herbal studies programs, and ethnic communities.
• Create a board of oversight comprised of ethnic leaders, herbal studies and gardening programs, and others of relevant expertise.
• Design financial remuneration to be derived organically from herb plant and plant product sales, lease of propagation and research facilities, sale of solar power, and from public education programs and events.  This remuneration ideally would cover the costs of maintenance and management of the garden facility.
• Present the University of California at Berkeley with the unprecidented opportunity to launch a cutting edge Herbal Tradition Studies program based among the plants in the Medicinal Herb garden on the UC Gill Tract Community Farm.
• Transformation of Healing Spirit Plants (medicinal herb nursery) into a contribution to the establishment and management of this Medicinal Herb Garden as well as many others throughout the wider community.
• Facilitate a Community Centered Peace.

A PEACEFUL COMMUNITY CENTER

We live in a community of numerous cultures and traditions, many of them rapidly vanishing.  As we lose these cultural traditions, we lose their inherent depths of consciousness, and manner of mind use, all of which facilitate compassion and peace within us and throughout the world.

A multi-traditional Medicinal Herb Garden provides the opportunity for the revitalization of our relationships with the plants, restoring our respect for their compassionate energies, and thus also for the cultural traditions based upon them.

Reverence for the energies of living presence, as well as their pharmacological properties, requires a sacred space within which to experience spiritual communion with the plants.

We have a choice! When we spend our time with plants, they ground us, relax us, and invite our focus in our hearts:   We feel compassion and peace.

A FULL-FLEDGED MEDICINAL HERB GARDEN

A “Full-Fledged” Medicinal Herb garden encompasses the major medicinal traditions: Chinese Acupuncture, Indian Ayurvedic, Arabian/Mediterranean, Classical European, Latin American, Native North American, African American, Native Californian, and also African, Southeast Asian, Japanese, Mexican, Australian, and Pacific Island.

Garden covers the full spectrum of herbs used in all the known healing modalities: Alimentary and Culinary, Physical and Physiological, Psychological and Spiritual, obvious and subtle; and in the forms of plant parts, poultices, teas, tinctures, decoctions, ointments, essential oils, flower essences, fumigants, and homeopathic micro-doses.

Garden will include 15 traditional gardens, 7 specific use gardens, a Sacred Center garden, An herbal boutique and herbal tea patio, A nursery, Propagation and Research facilities, 55 medicinal trees, 27 world conifers, Bio-swales and catchment, passive solar and panels.

Garden will Provide: Educational opportunities, Seminar and workshop spaces, Herbal processing facilities, Outdoor lecture and event space, Herbal products, Tonifying teas, Peace and quiet, Sacred space, Research facilities, Employment, Opportunity to experience plant energies, Cultivation of compassionate energy consciousness, Empowerment of ethnic diversity, Unification of the community in the garden, A center of grounding compassion, Reclamation of our community economy, Inspiration and support for herbal practice, Perpetuation of rare and endangered herb varieties, Herb plants for additional gardens,  Gratitude and Joy!