THE ECOSYSTEM DYNAMICS OF THE GARDEN

Gardens have always been seen as places stimulating well-being and pleasure. This feature emerges from the dynamics of these peculiar ecosystems. In the present paper these dynamics are analyzed in the framework of recent approaches to self-organization. The role of the different components of a garden is examined. From the most ancient times the garden has been considered a privileged place for achieving emotional and physical well-being and pleasure. This result emerges by a skilful combination of ingredients, whose main components are water, rocks, plants and architectural design. This combi- nation induces in the humans staying in the garden a strong enhancement of many inner capabilities, including the most hidden or less utilized ones. We could say that humans visit gardens in order to discover hidden parts of themselves, to feel well and to be in harmony with nature. An intriguing connection has been discovered in ancient times between gardens and healing places. For instance the famous Asclepeion, the sanctuary of Asklepios at Epidaurus, in Greece, was built around a network of pathways that exhibit in a sequence symbols, shapes, places able to induce healing and transformation processes. The aim of the present article is to analyze these properties of gardens in the frame of some con- cepts introduced by the holistic approaches of modern science, such as thermodynamics of irreversible processes (TIP) and quantum field theory (QFT). These approaches are discussed in other articles of the present issue of the journal (1-4). SOME FEATURES OF THE DYNAMICS OF LIFE 2 The main achievement of the holistic approaches to biology is that life emerges from a process of self-organization. This conclusion is the result of a long chain of achievements that starts from the vitalistic tradition whose main exponent at beginning of last century has been Driesch (5, 6). Further steps have been accomplished by Gurwitsch (7) with the discovery of mitogenetic radiation, Piccardi (8, 9) with the recognition of the fundamental role of water and ambient electromagnetic (e.m.) background in the dynamics of life. Tentative synthesis have been formulated along the last century by Bauer (10), Szent-Gyorgyi (11, 12), Prigogine (13) and Froehlich (14, 15). The following formulation emerges at the end of this chain: living matter comes out from a process of self-organization, absent in non-living matter, centred around water. Let us summarize the properties of liquid water as emerging from the QFT approach (16). Liquid water is a mixture of two interspersed phases, one coherent, where all microscopic units oscillate in unison between two configurations of the molecule electron cloud, the other, noncoherent, made up of noncorrelated molecules behaving as a dense gas. In bulk water there is a continuous crossover of molecules between the two phases. However, near a hydrophilic surface the coherence domains get stabilized by the interaction between molecules and wall, so that the coherent fraction is allowed to develop a long-lasting dynamics. The coherent phase of liquid water has the peculiar property that the oscillation of the electron clouds occurs between a ground state where all electrons are tightly