April 2025 – Up The Garden Path with Tending to Endings

Tending to Endings is a collective and a project that grew out of the year-long Death & the Collective Imagination Huddle, which was an attempt to explore loss and change through various lens. The collective is currently piloting a deck of garden-inspired cards to foster discussions about endings and the ways those endings can foster growth and nurture new beginnings.

A virtual packed house joined this gathering to learn more and explore the deck ourselves. Here are some of the takeaways.

The Crisis Is Our Lack of Imagination

The session began with a guided meditation by Will Brown, the group’s resident garden thinker. It was followed by an introduction to the project by Ally Kingston, who spoke about the project’s inception and the work they’ve carved out for collective dreaming and storytelling. For many months they met around and near literal compost heaps in public parks and forms to soak in the mystery and muck of what was being disposed of and broken down.

Ally says their months of thinking and talking together in these spaces brought them to the realization that what was most urgent was for us to unlearn a lot of our ways of working. She and her collaborators wanted to create something that fostered “dreaming and healing and grieving and art making and sensing and using the body, listening to the gut, and acknowledging all those bits of us that have been conditioned to say, ‘This doesn’t sound like the real work. Let’s get back to the the carbon measurements.”

From there came the idea of the cards.

A Visual Language

Heather Knight is the third member of the team; she was brought in to help design the deck. She had a background working on global issues but had recently turned her attention to how she could make an impact on a local scale. After exploring many different visual themes, she settled on one called Dark Botanical that played with the sense of a Victorian garden and built on common garden items and activities..

Once the beta set of cards were created, the team posted them off to colleagues around the world. They have been bowled over by the feedback. Many users have found that the cards give them a new way to talk about and shape the endings that are arising in their lives or organizations.

“(The work is) dreaming and healing and grieving and art making and sensing and using the body, listening to the gut, and acknowledging all those bits of us that have been conditioned to say, ‘This doesn’t sound like the real work. Let’s get back to the the carbon measurements.’”

-Ally Kingston, Tending to Endings

Many Branches, Many Blooms

After the thorough introduction by the team, our group was finally able to scroll through digital images of the cards. Meditating first on examples of endings in our lives, we then broke out into small groups to draw on particular cards and connect them back to our particular endings. After the groups wrapped up, we rejoined the main session to share a few takeaways.

While some members enjoyed how free form the exercise was, others mentioned wanting more structure about how exactly the cards should be used. In addition, while some were easily able to connect with the images and their significance, other astute members pointed to the fact that different cultures had different gardening traditions and, as such, might not make the same associations a person in a British gardening transition would. We circled around the question of whether the cards were too culturally and place-specific to be of broader use.

Finally the group shared that this deck was only the first pass and that they were continuing to develop them for broader production and eventual sale. They also expressed an interest in finding additional support and funding for the project.

Thanks again to the Tending to Endings collective for sharing this fledgling project with the community!