“It’s been a dream position for me,” says True Nature’s Megan Miller, the Peace Garden manager of seven years.
We’re seated at a sunny cafe table above the Yoga Spiral lawn, discussing her experiences in the Garden and her new role as True Nature’s assistant director.
It’s one of the first truly spring days, so the garden is lively. From the Fire Circle, voices and laughter lift and settle like birds in a forest. Languorous contentment seems to fill passersby. The impact of aliveness and beauty in the gardens is obvious: nature is restorative.
As it is today, the Peace Garden is both a metaphor and symbol of Miller’s own becoming.
“I grew up with my hands in the soil. My mom is a gardener. My aunt is a landscape designer and gardener. It was always the language I felt most comfortable with. When I was a kid, it was my form of play.”
From that fecund genesis, Miller bounced from political science to anthropology, philosophy — each intrinsic to the field she sank her roots in: landscape horticulture and design through Colorado State University.
“I had friends in landscape architecture. I got to know the program, and it was a lot of computer work,” she says. “Horticulture was much more alluring; more plant focused, more science to it. It was more applicable.”
She loved the history courses, studying the grand gardens that created these two fields. But, she felt the architecture courses were too theoretical.
“My question is always around people and their relationship to the natural world, and on a more intimate level,” she explains. “Design feels like I can impact the way people literally step out their front doors. I get to work with the natural environment; the land is my canvas for creative expression; plants are my palette.
Growing up in Montrose, though, like so many young people from a small town, all she wanted was out. After college, she landed in Telluride, the land of three to four jobs and five to six roommates. Discovering True Nature’s open position in the Peace garden brought Miller to Carbondale, where gardening paired with conscious living has been a life of attunement.
“The way that we walk on this planet, the way we relate to our natural spaces; who are we in that? Those questions have always been there,” she says.
Biodynamics has studied this attunement for a century. As such, Miller attended a workshop for biodynamics preparation BD506 (a compost preparation made from dandelions) her first season in Carbondale. In biodynamics, growers engage with the sun, the moon and the cosmos, using nine specific preparations to enliven and strengthen soil and plants. The preparations are made from fermented plant parts (blossoms, leaves, bark), animal parts, manure and minerals.
Placing her hands in the dandelion prep that day “was a full body, transportive experience,” she grins. “I flashed back to when I was kid making potions behind the fence at my neighbor’s house — I had this little cave! This is the language my soul knows! My bones know — older than time — I was always searching. My connection to the natural world was very, very strong.”
Over the last seven years, Miller feels she and the Peace Garden have grown alongside each other. And, it was all consuming, “Sometimes from dawn until after dark, weeding with my headlamp,” she chuckles. As such, the immaculate, intricate and intimate spaces within the gardens have become a beloved venue for a lot of programming — tea dates between friends, a setting for ceremonies, monthly preschool visits, live music.
Garden use, and the events themselves, have often been free and Miller wants these events to continue to be free. Whether it’s sponsoring $100 for 70 preschoolers to drink lemonade each month, or underwriting the Summer Music Series so True Nature can staff the front desk to keep the bathrooms open, so performers can be paid and have a place to lay their heads afterwards. As assistant director, Miller now has dedicated time to seek funding for Peace Garden functions.
Conversely, watching the community come together and connect on intimate levels in the gardens is beyond monetary value to Miller.
“The value of the Peace Garden cannot be put on a balance sheet. The person who walks in and visits the labyrinth and mourns their grandmother, that’s invaluable. The Peace Garden will never generate revenue to cover itself. It’s so much bigger than that.”
Want to discover aspects of your own true nature while learning a bit more about the True Nature Peace Garden? Join Megan Miller and newly promoted Peace Garden Manager, Sarah Lucy for Volunteer Spring Clean Up Days Wednesday, May 17 and Saturday, May 20, from 8am to noon.