Doesn’t it seem amazing that a seed planted in England could sprout in the middle of the United States in Kansas? In the heartland of America, smack dab in the middle of the USA there are fruits of the Quiet Garden Trust, Philip Roderick and Jackie Lock’s gentle Quiet Gardening nurture.

In 1994, Philip attended a Spiritual Director’s International meeting at a Benedictine monastery in Atchison. As luck would have it, so did I, having just completed study at the Shalem Institute in Washington, DC and ripe for this concept of creating Quiet Spaces for spiritual growth and contemplation. Mixed into this meeting was the additional fertilizer that the Episcopal Diocese of Kansas Spiritual Growth Committee had the backing of our bishop, the Rt Revd William E. Smalley, to explore unique and low cost ways to offer spiritual growth opportunities throughout the diocese.

Philip travelled to Bethany Place, the Diocesan conference centre in Topeka, to meet with a group of potential Quiet Gardeners from eastern Kansas and a network of tiny roots began to spread. With the support of our English Quiet Garden friends, Quiet Gardens of Kansas began to grow from those tiny seeds planted in fertile soil at just the right time.

Our first Quiet Gardens ranged in size and location from the large Bethany Place Quiet Garden, located in an urban setting with a conference centre, to Wellspring, a rural wildflower space nurtured by Kansas State University students and a woman priest and her family. Both hosted spiritual growth opportunities that varied from overnight retreats exploring the Quiet Gardening theme to weekend regional creation/arts festivals filled with music and creative arts. As the winds scatter seeds here in "the land of the southwest wind", the growth of the concept of creating quiet spaces for reflection in a garden setting flourished. An English war bride living near Sedan, in the chalk hills of southeast Kansas in a century old home (that’s old here on the plains), opened her renovated home on the prairie that combined the formal English garden she attempted to grow in the chalky soil and the wide open spaces of rolling hills. A Quiet Place on Terrace, my English cottage style six level home with surrounding English cottage garden adapted to Kansas heat and dryness, offered regular retreat days and a place for spiritual companionship.

Quiet Gardens in Wichita, Kansas City, Clay Center, and Lawrence joined the network and offered an ever widening Quiet Gardening concept. A Quiet Garden in an old warehouse in downtown Wichita, Poustinia in the Marketplace, provided counselling and refuge to battered women. They created wheel barrel mini-gardens that could be rolled in at night and incorporated the Quiet Garden concept into their meetings. On the rural scene, women met to explore Martha and Mary’s Way at the Walkabout Retreat Center in Lawrence, where a prairie labyrinth was mowed in the wild flowers and tall grass .

The Quiet Gardens of Kansas are like annuals, growing and blooming in one year, biennials, taking at least two years to bloom and perennials that live on still in 2006. Quiet Gardeners, like plants, move to another location, die and turn their interest to other "soils". As we read Quiet Places, the realization of the diverse soils that nurture Quiet Gardens keeps that thread of the fragile cobweb linking the worldwide Quiet Gardens together.

Thank you, England, for your gift to the Quiet Gardens of Kansas and the people of the United States.