It has been a busy week over here. My mother is visiting come Mother’s Day so I am trying to get as much of the yard work and garden tending to as possible beforehand. It’s been a big job and the boys have been very helpful.

One of the ‘jobs’ I wanted to share with the boys was the making of a medicine wheel garden. We have a plethora of rocks of all types and sizes in our yard. Start digging and you are bound to find one. When I was digging out a spot for our cold frame last fall I came upon many rocks which I added to a pile already on the go. I had wanted to create a medicine wheel garden last year but, with the huge undertaking of our first veggie garden, the time got away from us. I checked out this book from our library a couple of times last year and again this year. It is on my ‘to buy’ list for anyone wondering (wink wink).

This book takes you through the history of the medicine wheel and explains its significance. The circle is an ancient symbol, a strong symbolic shape. Here is one of the many wonderful quotes in the book:

In many ways this circle, the Medicine Wheel, can best be understood if you think of it as a mirror in which everything is reflected. “The Universe is the mirror of the People”, the old teachers tell us (the teachers being Cheyenne ancestors), “and each person is a mirror to every other person.” Any ideal, person, or object, can be a Medicine wheel, a mirror for Man. The tiniest flower can be such a mirror, as can a wolf, a story, a touch, a religion, or a mountaintop.

– Hyemeyohsts Storm, Seven Arrows, 1972

This book has many interesting chapters of which I have not had a chance to read, yet. It has a great section on specific plants and is how I found out more about the amazing ‘old man’s beard’ that I have always seen on many trees in our parks.

It has a full description with many ideas for different types of medicine wheels. You can plant according to colours and their relation to North, South, East and West. There are also diagrams shown for best plants for different regions. I may use as reference the Coastal Medicine Wheel Garden. I noticed one design for the Desert Southwest Medicine Wheel Garden and thought of a friend of mine who has just recently moved to the Southwest States. Dawn, this may be right up your alley.

The rain is coming and it’s a new moon today. That gives me time to let ideas brew in my mind about what to plant in our medicine wheel. The area I chose is a very shaded corner protected from busy, running feet. I have found this book extremely helpful for listing many wonderful shade-loving plants. The timing was perfect when this book arrived just yesterday! It’s worth getting your hands on if you like to plant according to the moon phases and would like to include your children in the gardening fun. It even has a section on best plants for a moonlit garden and which plants are toxic. I had no idea that Moonflower was toxic!

So, as I got our tools ready the boys gathered the rocks from around the yard and from the previously formed pile of last year and created a new pile close to our designated spot. I love the way they think. They didn’t just create a pile but made a cave of rocks instead. One look and I wished we could keep it. They asked for a picture and then were okay with dismantling.

I cleared away a section of the yard, moved the hosta and violets to another area nearby so they wouldn’t get trampled or quickly overtake the area of the wheel. Then we measured to find out how big we could make the wheel. Six feet was our maximum diameter and was bigger than I thought we would get. From here, we marked the middle with a beautiful white granite rock speckled with black. Then we found our co-ordinates with a compass and string. Now we had our North, South, East and West spots marked with the biggest rocks, and ones shaped like arrows, well kind of.

Next, we gathered the rest of the rocks to make the final formation. The biggest rocks formed the outside circle. The many smaller rocks were used to create a little path to the centre. At first, I was planning on just making a single line to the centre from each co-ordinate but Xman wanted to be able to make a walking path leading to the middle. It was just big enough for smaller feet. We have a good amount of moss in our shady areas and plan on using this for the path. Now we just need to figure out what plants to add. It was a great collaboration and we all enjoyed taking in our creation once finished.

The sun was warming our backs while we worked and creating fun shadows from the tree branches – and me and my little camera. All this digging, rearranging and carrying made us all a little pooped so inside we went for orange juice snow cones!

Today the rain begins for days to come but when it stops, there will be many seeds to plant in the veggie gardens – with Nanna’s help! – and many herbs and other plants to attend to in our new medicine wheel. I look out the window and I smile. I feel we’ve added a little protection, a little blessing to our humble, small part of the Earth.