How to Cultivate Awe & Wonder With Experience, Curiosity, & Inspiration

Art of the Garden

Oct 26

Recently, I read how awe can improve our health; the experts say we underestimate the impact of awe and its ability to create interpersonal wonder.

…And that awe often stems from novelty ~ an openness to experience. Straight away, this notion triggered an “aha” moment for me. After all, my Garden Glamour blog is all about Inspiration. Discovery. I knew straight-away that awe and wonder are what makes our love of gardens, plants, and gathering such a human emotion.

Think about it.

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We cultivate awe through interest and curiosity.

“Awe is the feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends your understanding of the world,” said Dacher Keltner, a psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley. In his book, Dr. Keltner writes that awe is critical to our well-being — just like joy, contentment, and love. His research suggests it has tremendous health benefits that include calming down our nervous system and triggering the release of oxytocin, the “love” hormone that promotes trust and bonding.”

The article in the Times explains the concept of awe and how to develop our sense of awe. If you’ve lost that childlike curiosity and thrill with discovery, you can readily learn to cultivate it.

I believe that experiencing gardens and plants and nature is the surest, most relatable way we all experience that wonder ~ stimulating our interest and curiosity.

Who doesn’t feel transported just walking in the garden, the park, or the woods?

Using all our senses. Looking. Really looking at the plants, not just their blossoms. Seeing the intricate doily-like foliage patterns, leaves, and perhaps spider webs. And a bird's nest. Even wasp nests ~ that marvel of architecture and design.

Hearing the interplay of birds and animals and the wind through the plants. Touching the velvet, felty leaves of lamb’s ears or the softness of fountain grasses…

And oh, the fragrances.

Is there anything better than using your senses to see, feel, hear, smell, and sometimes, taste, the plant leaves, blossoms and foliage?

There is a never-ending display of plants we can experience ~ not just in the seasonal garden but in the wild. In our botanic gardens and arboretum where exotic and otherworldly plants live.

Even us horticulturists thrill to the idea that we will never, ever, know all there is to know and learn about the world of plants.

And the even better good news is that plants love us!

This is a mutually satisfying love affair.

So if novelty begets awe and wonder, there is no better place to seek these emotions than in the ever-changing world of plants.

When giving tours to visiting journalists or dignitaries to the Botanic Gardens, I’d point out that we were part of the cultural institutions group ~ a museum of plants. But the lucky-strike extra here is that unlike the Monet or Picasso ~ as incredible as those art objets are ~ they remain the same no matter how often we see them. However, the art of the garden changes. Every season. Every day.

There is wonder and reverence being offered to us. Something new all the time. If we just look. Just pay attention…

We need reminding that Awe is all around us.

I refer to myself as a philomath ~ that is a person who loves learning and studying.

There’s not enough hours in the day to learn as much as I’d like to. There’s so much wonder to explore.

And just think, we all have been gifted with a ready-made resource for feeding our own innate desire to learn just outside our door. (Or in our potted plants indoors.)

Nurturing our Nature Connection

We can develop this sense of awe and wonder by just practicing garden mindfulness.

This is the opposite of “plant blindness.”

Plant Blindness or "Plant Awareness Disparity" (PAD) is sadly, a very real occurrence.

The term was first coined by botanists Elizabeth Schussler and James Wandersee. “It is the inability to notice or recognize the importance of plants in the environment, and to appreciate their unique biological features.”

At the botanic gardens where I worked, we often pointed out when teaching the parents and caregivers, that unless one developed their child’s plant awareness, they could grow to simply dismiss or look past plants altogether…

But Seeing Plants in the Garden; in Nature, inspires and ignites a recurring sense of Awe. We create what the experts call, “Interpersonal Wonder.”

Finding and experiencing awe can be cultivated through interest and curiosity. Being in Nature and our gardens “primes us for awe.”

I also believe that seeing a beautiful tablescape or barscape can also trigger the sense of discovery, novelty and awe. It’s the unexpected that sets us up to experience awe.

The experts in the Times’ feature explain how Awe is its own thing. More than even when we experience joy or contentment… Awe activates vagal nerves, slows heart rate, and relieves digestion and deepens breathing. And creates psychological benefits.

Finding Inspiration in Others’ Moral Beauty

Another tool to experience awe, Dr. Keltner said, is to spend time learning about inspiring people. ‌When we spend time watching what he terms the “moral beauty” of others, we can feel the awe.

Here’s my commercial break ^:^ ~ Spend time learning about inspiring women by watching my Ladies Who Lunch Conversations videocast. (See link below) to Follow and engage with incredibly inspiring women.

I’ve had the privilege to interview and showcase a world-class ballerina, a climate scientist, a fragrance designer, an etiquette coach, a spirits distiller, an interior designer, political activists, and more. These ladies bring me to tears with their stories of dedication to family, career, community, and the goodness of others. I know they will surely inspire you as well.