by Brent Knoll | Jun 7, 2013 | Landscape design
A Healing Garden is a space that is created with the intention to enhance our inborn stability and to reinforce the grounding belief that we are connected with nature. It’s a space with a therapeutic magnetic pulse, a beacon that offers solace and sanctuary for all to enjoy fresh air, sunshine and shade. With exotic flowering trees, fruits, veggies, herbs and sacred plants, and with architectural accents like fountains, benches, bridges and bird baths, a Healing Garden becomes a space to connect with friends and family, a place where you can express your creativity, and can nurture and love. The plants that you choose to share this space with you become your friends, an extended green family. By introducing super foods, herbs and fruits, you can create a sustainable space for nurturing on the physical level, and feel empowered to take your health into your own hands by growing your own food, rekindling the sense of stewardship that is our birthright. By carefully selecting native trees that will thrive in this tropical climate, including flowering plants to attract butterflies, and bushes with berries to attract birds and other friends, your Healing Garden will become a natural extension of your home. It is in our power to create a space where you can gather, connect, explore, share, bond, laugh, nurture and meditate, a place where you can feel grounded and centered.
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by Brent Knoll | May 13, 2013 | B-Edible Landscape, Education
A Healing Garden is more than a landscape, it is a spiritual oasis that can directly affect what we bring into our lives. Our Healing Garden is the anchor to our truth of who we are and what we want to feel. The Healing Garden is the highest guru and has the power to reshape the essence of our human experience.
As much as we enjoy socializing and spending time in community, we really need to value and honor our need for solitude and personal space. When we go out into the world we consciously and unconsciously interact with so many different energies that can alter our mood and affect our thought patterns. Sometimes, among all the various energies, we can become confused and mistake what we are feeling for the energies of others around us. This confusion is more common than we realize and if we don’t allow ourselves to take time in solitude amongst our own sacred space we can lose touch with the personal essence that brings us our peace of mind.
Labyrinth garden
A Healing Garden provides an ideal energetic sanctuary for us to relax and contemplate what really matters in our lives. Within the boundaries of a Healing Garden we can sort through our thoughts and feelings while being supported by the pure nourishing energies of the living plants all around us. Those plants and their natural energies provide an energetic reference with which we can calibrate our own energy field and identify any discordant energies that we may have picked up out in the world. The more time we spend in our healing garden space, the more familiar we become with the pure energies of nature, and the more familiar we become with those pure energies of serenity and life the easier it will be for us to move towards that type of energy wherever we are.
Consider, in this context, the law of attraction. The energetic vibration that you are projecting attracts thoughts, feelings, people, and objects that match or resonate with that vibration. When we are feeling angry, tense, hopeless or depressed our vibration is very low and so we attract unproductive and unharmonious situations. When we are feeling joyful, positive, relaxed, and grateful, our vibration is very high and we attract situations that are beneficial, serendipitous and fruitful. That being said it is wisest to always keep your vibration high, but of course that is much easier said than done.
Healing garden design
No matter how much time we spend in contemplation, practicing relaxation, or in meditation we still do not have control over the vibrations and energies that are brought into our field of experience by those around us. The people that we encounter in our lives have unpredictable moods and vibrations that, despite how much we may care for them, affect the way we feel and therefore what we attract into our lives. Friends, family and strangers alike embody inconsistent and erratic energetic patterns that can make it difficult for us to remain grounded in our experience of peaceful consciousness.
On the other hand, the plants, flowers, butterflies, bees, trees and all beautiful life in our healing garden embodies a steady and reliable vibration of graceful vitality and joyful abundance. The more time we spend in that presence the more we will align our own energetic vibration with it. As we begin to identify more and more with the energy of the healing garden it becomes easier and easier to maintain that vibration out in the world. As this vibration becomes an effortless constant projection we will begin to attract circumstances into our lives that reflect the abundance, prosperity, vitality, and joy of the healing garden energies. You will invariably discover that the new people and opportunities that come into your life are also embodying this very high vibration of prosperous joy and abundance.
Healing garden design
Building a Healing Garden is, in itself, an energetic declaration of personal reformation. When you take the time and effort to build this sanctuary for yourself you are putting the universe on notice that you are ready and able to be filled with lively joy and abundance. You are taking responsibility for your self in a way that is energetically, ecologically, and economically sustainable. You are opening yourself up to a sacred healing partnership with the earth and accepting the grace and providence of nature. When you identify with the high vibration of the Healing Garden you are beginning to realize that, like the earth, you have all the power to heal, and to provide safe energetic space for yourself and others.
Landscape Designer Brent Knoll of Knoll Landscape Design specializes in Healing Garden Design. Call Brent today at 3054965155 to schedule a consultation and experience for yourself the Healing Power of the Garden.
Brent Knoll
by Brent Knoll | Feb 27, 2013 | B-Sustainability, Education
Composting in South Florida
Often times you may be driving around South Florida, and you will see landscape trucks filled to the brim with dead palm fronds, tree clippings, pulled weeds, and many other products of a day’s work in the yard. You may also see these piles sitting out by the curb waiting to be collected by waste management.
We see it all the time and it has become very normal for us. After all, what else are you going to do with all of that “waste”? When you have your yard mowed, your hedges clipped, weeds pulled, trees trimmed, and leaves raked you have to do something with all of that “stuff” don’t you? You can’t just leave it there, can you?
Leaf pile
Natures composting process
Well lets think about what would happen out in nature. If we sent teams of landscapers into a pristine forest and collected all the fallen leaves, dead branches, decomposing fruits, and all other fallen “waste”, and we brought it out of the forest to the dump, then that forest would surely perish. It may look prettier and “neater” to our conditioned eyes for a time, yet that forest would starve to death before very long.
We know that , along with plenty of sunshine, plants feed on nutrients in the soil. They gather the nutrients with their roots and use them to create new growth. However, we need to ask ourselves how do those nutrients get into the soil. How does the soil replenish itself? The answer to that question lies in heaping piles at the Dade county dump. The decaying matter that falls from the plants at the end of a life cycle decomposes on the ground and the nutrients from that decomposition replenish the soil; making it very fertile.
Composting leaves
Composting as fertilizer
Of course when we have a detached experience of the process of nature we might be conditioned to think that plant food comes in bags and bottles from the Gardening store. We assume that manufactured fertilizers are essential to a healthy landscape and that rich potting soil is something that must be purchased at the Ag shop. The truth is that when we understand, appreciate and facilitate the natural process of plants, we see that the plants have all the necessary resources to take care of themselves.
Manufactured plant foods and fertilizers are really just a poor quality replacement for the high quality, nutrient rich plant food that is literally falling into our yards everyday. When we gather and remove the clippings and deadfall from our backyards we are not only taking away the most nutritious and compatible food source from our plants, but as we throw these resources away we are also throwing away all the money we spend on fertilizers, plant foods, soil, etc.
Brent smelling fresh composted soil
Composting is clean
The good news is that we CAN have the best of both worlds if we learn to work with nature’s process. We can have a neat clean and tidy yard while still being able to utilize the free food that our plants provide for themselves. We do this when we create a composting system in our own yards. Simply by finding an inconspicuous area behind some hedges or in a hidden corner to pile our debris, we create an inexhaustible source of food for our many plants. When we gather and mix our yard clippings, chipped branches, dead leaves, and food scraps, we watch our soil and plant food being created before our eyes.
At Knoll Landscape Design, Brent Knoll encourages his clients to avoid taking anything organic off of their property. Brent knows the value of that organic matter and how much it means to his plant friends in his organic landscapes and gardens. He also realizes that one of the greatest advantages to the copious heat and sunshine of the South Florida climate is how rapidly organic yard waste can decompose to become fertile soil. This advantage makes the compost turnover rate surprisingly fast, and leaves little excuse not to have a compost area in every yard. Brent will actually find a suitable space for a compost area in his clients yards and can even create functional and aesthetically pleasing compost bins when desired. This is his way of being sure that no nutritious future plant food is tragically towed away to the dump.
Organic vegetables grown from compost
Composting is the way of the future
Although it should be known that, thanks to Brent, even when others unknowingly dispose of this nutritious organic plant food it doesn’t necessarily go to waste. A wise man knows that what many perceive as trash, others see as treasure. When Brent builds his magnificent garden spaces he is actually using your waste! Brent collects the organic matter that has been sent away by other homeowners and uses it to build massive stores of “homemade” organic soil. Using his own special composting process, Brent takes truckloads of chipped trees, yard waste, and manure and turns it into some of the most fertile soil in South Florida.
So now that you know how it works, “Keep it in your own yard”. Create a space for a compost pile and collect all that beautiful nutritious debris. This is a cornerstone of sustainability. Why throw away the resources nature provides only to use industrial means of manufacturing unnatural and inherently poor quality substitutes that cost you money? Embrace your ecological relationships and utilize the perpetual providence of nature. This natural partnership is essential to our philosophy at Knoll Landscape Design, and facilitating that process for our client’s is our mission.
Raised Bed Garden
Need help with your Organic Garden?
Need help getting started wtih your organic garden? Knoll Landscape Design is there for you. Call Brent Knoll at 3054965155 to schedule an in person consultation and get your organic garden going in the right direction. Brent has been designing organic gardens in Miami for over 20 years and is ready to help you. Call today!
Landscape Designer Brent Knoll
by Brent Knoll | Feb 18, 2013 | B-Community Projects, Education
Brent and Sarah are excited to announce their new project that is sure to bring sweet and delicious fun and education to children all across the South Florida school system.
We all know by now that children are the future. So if we want a bright sustainable future we need to provide an avenue for children to be actively engaged in the wonders of the soil, sun and sky. They need a way to learn the fundamentals of our natural human bond with the earth and her bounty.
Brents Organic Gardens is infiltrating the south Florida schools to design and set up fruit gardens to be planted, maintained, and harvested by the children. Brent and his crew of volunteers will bring all the necessary tools and materials to begin planting a beautiful and delicious edible garden, providing the children with the opportunity to be gardeners in training.
We need your help to really bring this project into full bloom. You can volunteer your time to help us build and plants these fruit gardens. You can spread the word and find schools or other public institutions e.g. nursing homes, hospitals, etc., that would be interested in this program. You can also make monetary donations to the projects so that we have the resources to implement this incredible mission all over the region!
Children should have the opportunity to plant, care for, and harvest their food while learning so much about what this great planet has to offer. By Engaging the planet in this manner, they will come to understand what “Real Food” is and come to appreciate the joy and virtue in a simple life led close to the earth.
The commercial junk food market has long been capitalizing on our children’s natural affinity for sweet colorful and delicious fruits. They have been exploiting these natural relationships to push candies and other junk foods that are packed with an excess of additives, refined ingredients, and countless other toxins all under the guise of their fruity colors and flavors. All of this deceptive manipulation has even begun given stigma to the raw organic fruits themselves, creating irrational rumors about the harms of fruit sugar and the like. The manipulation and perversion of these sweet and vibrant natural wonders has us all mixed around.
Now, by reintroducing our children to fruit in it’s purest, most natural form, we can give them the joyful experience of sweet, juicy, vibrant, colorful fruits and , at the same time, introduce them to the joys of gardening and growing our own food. These children will grow up with a healthy body, a uniquely special connection to nature, and a practical understanding of the limitless providence beneath the soil.
Children will be excited about their healthy natural foods; they will appreciate the earth, gain a stake in the quality of the soil, and align their thoughts and actions with upholding the highest quality of the soil and all natural elements. These children will have the opportunity to grow up within a conscious partnership with nature and that is partnership that will change the world.
A project that gives our children the tools necessary to understand and actualize their relationship with their eco-systems and appreciate the nutritioin of natural whole foods, while simultaneously facilitating joyful interactions with the plants and each other, is truly higher education.
If you know a school in the south Florida area that would be open and willing to participate in this project, contact us right away! We are excited to help you and your children grow a better tomorrow!
