ABSTRACT
In order to get the gist of how and why gardening can be therapeutic, if not provide a glimpse of immortality, it is important to understand how a master gardener typically thinks, acts, and feels. All sublimation relies on symbolisation, and gardening requires just such instinctual redirection and refashioning, that is, engaging in adaptive desexualised and "deaggressified" psychic processes. In other words, gardening represents one very good venue for the individual to negotiate the conflicting demands between desire, that is, instinctual gratification, and culture, the requirements of normative social reality. As gardening involves a lot of uncertainty and trial and error, it is a continuous "testing of what will hold with what" within a hugely complex, interactive environment of plants, trees, rocks, and water. The word paradise comes from the Persian root meaning "wall enclosing a garden or orchard". Gardening profoundly teaches the garden-maker something about the process of separation/individuation and identity development; in short, of becoming a person.
