(I): Books on Gardening, Well Being, Conservation

This is a series of books in production which will be published in Germany by SKMarketing365. The first three will be released in 2024.

The Water Gardener

There is something primordial about being near water and we feel better and happier when we feel and hear it. With our lives being so stressful and very often cut off from Nature and natural cycles and balance. We need that something in our daily lives which water can bring to re-harmonise and invigorate us. In this unusual book about gardening Stephen Ben Cox offers a way to have all the benefits that water can bring to our mental, physical, social life whilst simultaneously helping to heal the planet and support conservation and wildlife. 

 Effectively we live on a water planet water: water comprises 70% of the Earth's surface and as living creatures’ we humans are x percent water, and many aspects of our physiological and psychological rhythms are influenced and balanced by the moon and tides. Without it, life would stop. And it is now recognized that nearness to moving water releases positively charged ions which are good for human mental health. We all feel good when we are on holiday and near the water: it revitalizes and makes us happy. Therefore, doesn’t makes sense to have water in our gardens?

This book gives you a full understanding to all aspects of having water in your garden including such things as: Pond Building, Pond Landscaping, Bogs and Wetlands, Natural dipping & Swimming Pools, Fountains, Waterfalls, Bird baths & Water Stations, Rills, and much more. He also tells you something about suitable water plants to introduce and the range of wildlife you can attract to you garden.

Overall, what the author does is give you a complete guide to all aspects of how to create and install and design a garden which has lots of different water features for you to enjoy and bring wildlife and good times to your garden life. A garden with water suddenly become a magical, thriving, enriched an exciting space all the year round.

He takes us on a journey through the Mythology of Water and how our great, myths legends and religions teach us about it; surveys great Water Gardens of History and how they can inform and inspire us. He also explains the many Advantages of Water Gardening to all aspects of our life and lessons to enrich our lives. And gives you an introduction to some of the finest Water Gardens to Visit all over the world.  Finally, he offers his personal choices of suitable tools and methods and design elements to enrich and help your life via: water gardening.

[to be published in 2024 by SK Marketing365, Germany]

The Well Being Gardener

Our life has become one of stress, noise, pressure and demand. All around we now seek healing: for the planet and for ourselves. Well-being is now a buzz word as a passport to help us through it. In this dynamic and unique approach Stephen Ben Cox argues there is something missing: our loss of connection now also includes our actual search for healing: we cannot be healed if we are disconnected from home, heritage, nature, tradition.

Our disconnected and discarnate lives need help: the popular expression of well-being is touted as a means to restore balance, harmony, healing, and self-mastery. Surrounded by a plethora of noise stress pressure influences and much more well-being is a valuable concept to help rebalance us and give us certain peace of mind and freedom. and there is an immense amount of material out there from books to courses.

 However, the author takes a different approach and postulates that to truly engage with well-being we need to disengage from the centuries-old concept of humanity as being separate from and superior to nature and the rest of existence. This book is a dynamic new approach to the essence of well-being since it places the individual as part of tradition of heritage of spirituality and of an arcadian understanding of man in harmony with nature and the environment.

 Into this equation he brings a range of important understanding from years of personal exploration, study, and experience the important lesson to restore the lost values for true healing: the insights to be gathered from the Mythology; the wisdom of ancestral traditions in ‘Middle Earth’; the benefits of ‘Being In Nature’ ; the solace and empowerment of ‘Sacred Space’; he explores ‘Water Healing’;  the lessons of working with ‘The Seasons’ and intimates the symbolism  of ‘Creatures’; and helps us  understand the ‘Life-Debt, destiny and Archetypes’. 

He concludes with chapters on Advantages, Exercises, and Items of meditation/focus/help for your life and garden.

[to be published in 2024 by SK Marketing365, Germany]

 

The Happy Gardener

Becoming a ‘Happy Gardener’ or indeed being happy in life is a process of awakening, learning and transformation. In many ways, we are all sleepwalkers cut off from nature and ourselves. But there are so many things to do in the garden which not only makes the world a better place, enriches nature, adds to the beauty of one’s local community, creates habitat for other animals, and provides a place of welcome, beauty and relaxation for yourself your family and friends but also enriches one’s life in many other ways.

Gardening in the UK and other countries is now one of the biggest social activities and one of the biggest industries. And it has become one of the most important forms of exercise and well-being. Gardening is a key to physical health and mental health and provides opportunities for connection to nature, well-being, healthy living, as well as support for wildlife and contributing to conservation and the fight back against climate change.

This book is called The Happy Gardener because through gardening and the methods and strategies employed in this book which have been developed by Stephen Cox. He is gardener of over 55 years’ experience who has converted a half-acre field into a unique garden comprising rooms of different themes and pant collections together with pond, beach, waterfalls, statues, and much else.

Herein will be found methods and activities for gardening to become something else in one's life and open up an invaluable opportunity for the development and improvement of this life's journey. From his own experience he offers a range of insights and guides to become a Happy Gardener. The chapters include Water, Eat and Living Outdoor, Secret and Sacred Spaces, Animal Friends, Life With The Seasons, Colour and Composition, Sun and Shade, Dipping, The Wild Side, Celebration and Sacraments, Flexibility and Curiosity, Embracing Nature, and Health Aspects. Each chapter has a table at the end of essential lesion and exercises which can be incorporated into one’s garden and gardening and way of life, and a second table lists various items which can be introduced into the garden to assist in the process of well-being. He concludes with various appendices and exercises of things he has learnt about mental health, nature empath, well-being, conservation, and meditation/focus/help for your life and garden.

[to be published in 2024 by SK Marketing365, Germany]

 

(II): Video Texts

He composes the text and narrates the audio for the  Trust videos on its YouTube channel in conjunction with various student editors. (See Separate pageVideos).

Videos he has written & illustrated include:

A Journey of Statues. 

Neighbourhood Plans.

Embracing Eden.

Arcadia.

Garden Wildlife Crusade.

Water in the Trust Gardens.

The Secret Garden.

Introduction to the Trust

 

(the next to in production are: 

'Mars Repurposed' and

'Et in Arcadia Ego')

 

(III): West Country Memoirs

A World Away

There was safety, adventure, community and mystery in the hills, fields woods and village in those days.

Tradition and history everywhere abounded, and we were part of a living fabric that stretched back countless centuries. The cycle of the week, of the season and of the year and the festivals and rural routines therein marked the passage of our days.

It was a time of foods in season, of neighbourly bonds, of family gatherings and recognition of age old customs.

Our play was resourced not by electrical gadgets but by physical adventure and exploration, or historical enactment, and a sense of communion with Nature and the farming year.

 

Introduction

Growing up in a village (on the edge of a small town between Bath and Bristol) in the valley beneath the southern final sweep of the Cotswold Hills provides a rich ground for humour, nostalgia, social commentary, social history, anecdote and much more.

More than half a century have passed since those unspoilt, carefree, traditional days of childhood (1950-1962) and it seems a whole world away. For many years I used to go back to my native area every week for a day. Much has changed but some things endure- usually as snippets among a newer material and mass produced landscape.

I am engaged in writing around five dozen stories of various aspects of life then, and add to each as and when memories pop up from deep in the recesses of my little grey cells. Not many have been completed. These are:

1. Warmley House.   

2. The Secret of the Middle Playground.   

3. Half Day Holy Days.   

4. Old Tom and His Horse.   

5. Going Upstream.   

6. Adventures of the Brook.   

7.Warmley Church.   

8. Joan ‘The Egg’.   

9. Our Road.   

10. The Tump     

11. Barrs Court.   

12. Village Characters.   

13. The Swimming Baths.   

14.  The Hot Cross Bun Boys.

15. Giant and Waterfall (Neptune's statue)

16. The Police House

17. Mangotsfield Railway Station

18. The Village Bakery

19. The Old Mine Works & Woods

20. The Whitsun Parade

21. Tiddlers and Kingfishers

22. Griffin Cattle Market

23. The Old Dram Road

24. The Horizon

25. Hay Harvest

26. The Clay Pits

Subjects in progress are:

Grimsbury Farm;  The Strange Stone; Fog and Moon;  The School Play;  Mr. Wintle; Colliery Castle; Rodway Common; Coronation Day Street Party; The Art Expedition.  The Village Pubs. Dams and Dangerous Waters. Sally on the Barn. The Village. Four Winds Hill. Sunday Morning Walks. Hills and Horizon.  Sunday Tea. The Pub on The Common. Sunday Picnics.  Bottle of Pop At Uncle Jacks Pub. Penny Blackjacks et al. Upton Cheyney. Golden Valley. The Post Office Ladies. Mrs.Woolfords. The Village School. Syston Court. Warmley Station. Flooded Field Skating.

It was a time before the advent of the internet, or gprs, or colour television. There were hardly any motor-cars: in our road there was one car and one motorcycle (with side car). There were no holidays abroad. No one had a telephone in the house. Televisions- well these were just coming into our part of society- and they were tiny things about a twelve inch screen, and monochrome of course (hence the expression "sit around the telly"). And broadcasting was only for a few short hours a day so was a special feature.

Lots of things were still delivered to your home- milk, bread, coal, eggs, and the greengrocer with his horse and cart. The farm was opposite and we helped with hay harvest and played in the fields and woods. There were streams to explore and ruined cottages to dare go in. Here were hiding places and dens.

The village 'bobby' kept us all in check- and he had his own police house and little police station. But the village itself was the real law and order. No one dared step out of line, you grew up knowing what was expected of you as a member of the community. There was no mamby-pamby pc idiocy if you got a clip round the ear from a stranger for misbehaviour: we accepted it, for we were brought up to know right from wrong and if we dared go to the boundary and overstep the mark well we had to accept the result.

It was also a time when there were Church of England village schools which had the advantage of having extra half day holidays (such as Ash Wednesday). There was a community centre at the bottom of the road and a swimming bath filled from a spring higher up the valley. And in Chapel Lane (some families in our road were 'chapel' others were 'church') there was a tiny bakery. The smell of fresh warm bread floods me with memories to this day.

In our road there were neat gardens front and back and all homes raised their own vegetables. Neighbours chatted over the fence or out on the front wall. If you came home from school and your mother had had to go out then you were called in to a neighbours house to have tea, children were not left in the house on their own. Strict care and supervision was the order of the day unlike these days when latch-key kids and and careless parenting seem to be acceptable.

There were very few amenities and almost no luxuries. Food (except those items which came in a can) was what was in season. Alcohol was usually only consumed at Christmas in moderation, except for a bottle of sherry kept for special occasions for guests. The menfolk would occasionally walk across the field or down to the village for one beer together before Sunday lunch at home. There were plenty of family walks and picnics. And the extended family met regularly- aunts, uncles cousins all got together on birthdays and Easter and Christmas and at least each month in between. And kids often had to wear 'hand me downs' for some items of clothing. And you had one set of 'best clothes' you only wore on Sunday or for special events and outings. And of course no washing-machine: mum did the weekly wash in ' the boiler' in the outhouse- a metal container on legs fired via a gas tube which when the water was hot enough mum would stir around the laundry with a big stick the put it through a hand-mangle before pegging out to dry. And down in the village there were still some cottages not on mains water: age five I recall seeing old ladies come out to fetch water in buckets from a fast bubbling spring in a stone enclosure at the side of the road.

Whatever you wanted you had to save up and buy. No instant credit- and debt or buying things on tick was regarded as a cardinal sin. School leaving age was 14 (later raised to 15). There was no breathilyser. Pubs closed at 10.30pm. There was Wednesday afternoon closing of shops. And all shops were closed on a Sunday, except the off licence where a few items of tinned things could be obtained. The 'corner shop' was flourishing and supermarkets had not yet arrived. The only place open after 5pm was the off-license (which opened at 7pm). But there was 'Hicksies' off-license up on Hill Street where you could buy groceries of an evening if you'd run out.

Mothers made their own curtains, repaired shirts and trousers, and knitted cardigans and pullovers for all the family and made their own dresses- they had to, it was the only way to afford such items. And fathers husbanded a rich garden that kept their families supplied in most vegetables for a good part of the year.

There was no January 1st. or May 1st. Bank holiday. People went back to work on December 27th. or occasionally the 28th. And most people worked Saturday mornings. For a mother to go out to work was regarded as neglectful of the children. A good ordered home with a parent at home for the children was more important than consumer goods or a fancy holiday, or new furniture. The twin income home had not fully arrived.

Life was more ordered and reliable. I'm not sure if they were necessarily happier, for each generation accepts its lot I suppose. But they seemed happier for despite having "get by" and "make and mend" there was an intensity, creativity and excitement to almost all aspects of life. And standards were higher. Streets were safer. And the pace was more sedate and more human.

It was a time of safety, of family, of community, of Nature, of village and farm. It was a world away. But before I lapse into the inevitable grumpiness of the 'baby-boom' generation lamenting for the golden age, I'l stop! Read about the delights and dangers, magic and mystery of life in 1950's South Gloucestershire in my books.

I will say though that I feel blessed to have grown up in those times and regret that generations since have been impoverished by the passing of the humble riches that they contained

 

(IV): The Keys of Life

The Keys of Life is a major book entering final stages of writing dealing with aspects of life-coaching and self-help: THE KEYS OF LIFE by Stephen Ben Cox

(V): Wildlife and Conservation Articles

(VI): Wiltshire History Articles

(VII): Studley & Derry Hill History