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Posts Tagged: butchart gardens

Turn Your Gravel Pit into a Beautiful Life Garden

Posted by Marlene Anderson, MA, LMHC, NCC

In the late 1800s, Robert Butchart began excavating limestone from a quarry behind the home where he and his wife, Jennie, lived. When all the limestone was extracted, all that remained was a huge, ugly, expansive hole in the ground.

But Jennie was not willing to let it lay there discarded, ugly, and debased. With the help of architects and landscapers, topsoil from neighboring farmland was brought in and a beautiful design created.

We, too, have our personal gravel pits — those places where we feel scarred and flawed. How can we transform our seemingly hopeless situations into satisfying, productive and pleasing futures?

Read on to find out…

A Landscaping Plan for Your Life

Posted by Marlene Anderson, MA, LMHC, NCC

Turn Your Gravel Pit into A Beautiful Garden | focuswithmarlene.com

Years ago, working with people in transition, I put together a program called “Turn Your Gravel Pit into a Beautiful Garden.” Many of the people in the class came from difficult backgrounds and felt discouraged. The wounds experienced over a lifetime dug deep into their spirits, leaving long-lasting doubts and fears.

I used the internationally renowned Butchart Gardens as an example of how we can turn tragic events – whether an abusive childhood, broken marriages or relationships or simply struggling to make ends meet – into something beautiful and welcoming. It was an architectural concept that could be applied to the creation of our own plan for life that provided beauty, peace, and purpose.

Here is a short version of that program.

Turn Your Gravel Pit Into a Beautiful Garden

Posted by Marlene Anderson, MA, LMHC, NCC

Turn Your Gravel Pit into A Beautiful Garden | focuswithmarlene.com

Can something ugly and scarred be turned into something beautiful and inviting? Let me share with you a true story about a real gravel pit.

A gravel pit is a piece of land where bulldozers and huge earth-scooping machinery have removed the soil to extract gravel and other ingredients needed to build roads, make cement, gather building rocks, etc.

What remains, after all the extractions, is a huge scarred and pitted hole in the ground with unstable and crumbling sides, water seepage from underground springs, stagnant pools of rainwater, huge, discarded pieces of rock and other un-usable mounds of earth. Debris is scattered everywhere, discarded by individuals who consider this a worthless piece of land; a place to throw away their pop cans, beer bottles or candy wrappers.