We planted a Prayer Garden

Elements of a Prayer Garden

Please join us in our journey on how we created a simple and cozy prayer setting for our family and how you can do that too.

We have been through many ups and downs these past few years, but one of the things that strikes us as comforting, is that God has always taken us through it all. Now, we didn’t come out unscathed, but I can say that our very basic needs have always been met. We attribute that to a dedication to daily prayer and thanksgiving.

Everyone in our family has a strong work ethic. No one ever “told” us to do it. It just was that way. If we were going to do something, we did it well - we did it right. I also doesn’t mean that we never made mistakes - oh yeah, we did those too. That’s true for our garden planning. We lost many new plants to the “critters” that we didn’t know we had, until it was too late. We learned quickly.

Thankfully, through our trials (much worse than critters), God has given us a means to speak to Him. And it’s Prayer.

When Christ, our Messiah, walked this earth, we know that prayer was a vital part to not only his ministry, but as a tool for his teaching. Just look at how many times Christ prayed in the Scriptures! Here is a link to a quick summary (not ours). You get the idea.

So as prayer is important to our lives, sometimes the very best place to pray is outside - and we prefer in the garden. If you’re interested, we’ll show you how we took a little corner of our yard, and made it more welcoming for our family to pray.

Here is the bare spot we started with. There was a pile of stones scattered in one corner, and others that looked like a funky and broken heart shape. The broken heart was truly symbolic for a prayer garden. God fixes all of the broken hearted!

We brought all of the stones together to build up a small border for new plantings. The border already had a tall stone on one side that the birds frequently stood on. It was too deep to move without a lot of effort, so we decided to keep it there.

An old deteriorating bench from the previous owners was left on the property, so we repaired it, moved it into this space. We then created a stone path with flagstones, that meandered into and out of the “sunken” prayer area.

Boy did we move a lot of dirt! In the new stone planter, we added branches and leaves as a base before adding raised bed soil.

We knew that with all of our other obligations, we wanted a relatively no-fuss, and easy to care for prayer garden. We also didn’t want to attract more gophers than we already had. So we planted rosemary, oregano (lots!), nasturtium, aromatic herbs, narcissus bulbs, and potted geraniums.

If you don’t have a lot of space, a small bench, a little fountain, and potted plants make a great little prayer corner. Give it a try!

There was an existing small water feature and a wisteria in this area, whose heavenly fragrance was perfect for a prayer setting.

We also planted Russian Sage, Salvia yangii, previously known as Perovskia atriplicifolia, which is pictured here toward the walkway. It’s striking when in bloom with lovely purple flowers. It attracts pollenators and is easy to care for, a low water consumer, and is not only self-seeding, but you can also grow more from cuttings.

In the end, all of the work was worth it. We did lose the ground cover you see in the bottom right of this image, but we added some brightly painted songbird houses which seemed to make the other plant colors “pop.”

I hope our journey inspires you to create a simple Prayer Garden of your own.