14 jun 2025
Ti'an Callery, Garden Designer
Here is intimacy with the trees, grass, soil, and clouds. The beauty, variety and the vastness of nature clear away our petty thoughts. We can focus on this moment, on the wind in our face, the touch of our heel to the soft earth, knowing ever more deeply our kinship to all. 
Gardening at the Vermont Zen Center is an art form and spiritual practice. When gardening, we work in harmony, not only with each other, but also with plants, shrubs, trees, rock formations, and rivers. We listen attentively to what they teach and what they nourish. We learn how to plant, weed, prune, and design with a compassionate heart. Expressing the beauty that is always present and available brings us a sense of gratitude, peace, and joy.
What You Will Learn
Participants will learn the origin of Zen gardens and some of the principles unique to Zen gardening practice. The tour of the diverse gardens at the Vermont Zen Center will demonstrate various ways that these ancient principles are expressed. We will learn, through direct experience, how to work in the Zen gardening tradition with intention, mindfulness, and skill: cultivating, planting, pruning, weeding, and raking rivers of stone.
Schedule
- 09:00 — Welcome and Introduction
- 09:30 — Overview of Gardening at the Vermont Zen Center
- 10:30 — Tour of the Zen Center Garden
- 11:30 — Working in the Garden
- 12:30 — Reflection and Questions
- 01:00 — Refreshments
Instructor—Jhana Piché
Jhana, an ordained Buddhist priest, has been working in the Zen Center’s gardens since the first day she came to the Center. Over the years she worked closely with Ti’an Callery and Joan White and is now dedicating much of her time to maintaining the Center’s gardens and teaching others to do the same. Jhana can be found outdoors nearly every day during the growing season and is always available to help others find their place and pace in the practice of Zen gardening.
Nourishing sentient beings—shrubs, trees, flowers, worms, insects and the very soil of home—such a welcome calmness for practice. Turning the soil, weeding, and planting with a gentle brush of hand—the heart of the garden.
—Jhana Piché