Our Sacred Garden
The Living Earth
Embracing the Visionary in All of Us
By Adele Seronde
Published by Blue Moon Publications, Inc.
Smashwords Edition
Blue Moon Publications, Inc.
P.O. Box 1776, Sedona, AZ 86339
Second Edition Copyright 2011 by Adele Seronde
Copyright 2010 by Adele Seronde
All photographs, unless otherwise noted are courtesy of iStockphoto.com and BigStockphoto.com
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
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OTHER BOOKS BY ADELE SERONDE:
Children’s Phonetic Poetry Books, Wenkart Publishing Co.: “Ask a Daffodil,” 1967 and “Ask a Cactus Rose,” 1971.
“Deliver Into Green,” Wampeter Press (Poetry), 1982.
Co-authored with “Wordwatchers,” Sedona, AZ: “Between Silences,” 1990; “Facets,” 1999; “Aria,” 2000.
* * *
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank the members of my family and numerous friends who have given time, advice, commentaries and exchange of ideas. They are my sons and daughters; my grandson Michael Seronde; my nephew Eric and his wife Hoa Herter; niece Caroline Herter; and friends Erma Pounds, Mimi Griffin Crowell, Thistle Brown, Page Bryant, Daniel J. Finn, Katherine D. Kane, Jack Powers, Julie Stone, Vijali Hamilton, Eugenia Everett, Millie Chapin, Aya (Jean-Marie Schiff), Lane Badger, Joanna Crell, Lily Yeh, Ani Williams, Judith Quarrington; Jerry Simmons for his excellent advice; Catherine Rourke, Eveline Horelle Dailey and Rosemary Licher; Jane Perini for designing the book and Wib Middleton for photographing my artwork.
Most of all I am grateful to my courageous editors, James Bishop, Jr., and Bennie Blake; and finally, to Carol Horn for her endless patience, good will and advice.
* * *
I dedicate this book to my children,
Antoine, Jacques, Pierre, Dorée, Jeanne
and to my whole and extended family
as well as to my beloved deceased parents and husband.
* * *
CONTENTS
– Part I - What Are Sacred Gardens?
Chapter One: Meanings Of “Sacred”
Chapter Two: Personal Awakening To The Sacred
Chapter Three – The Need For Gardens Made Sacred By Love
Chapter Four – The Metaphysics Of Sacred Gardens
Chapter Five – The Chalice Garden
– Part II – Healing Of Community
Chapter Six – Urban Gardens And Playgrounds
Chapter Seven – Visionaries And Transformers
Chapter Eight – Lily Yeh – The Village Of Arts & Humanities
– Part III – Healing Of The Whole Earth
Chapter Nine – Awakening The Visionary In All Of Us
Chapter Ten – Protecting The Garden Of The Earth
Chapter Eleven – Passive And Active Healing
Chapter Twelve – Gardens For Humanity
– Part IV – Voices Of The Future
Chapter Thirteen – Visionary Voices
Chapter Fourteen – How People Are Meeting The Challenges
* * *
Prologue
BECOMING
Once
people said I was a Deva
to a world of plants.
They said I
would take this flower
of my green volition
and inseminate the
world!
So I must offer
soon
a resolution made of
green
in multiple tones of song.
I must weave cantatas of
bulrushes
bent in wind—
strains of catkins
grass-head
seeds and sky to wrap this dying world
and me—in
soul-heat–
infuse us with a solar passion so intense
we are
in symphonic presence
of becoming.
~
Aspen Garden
A visit to the Chalice Well Garden in Glastonbury, England, decades ago, turned out to be the incentive for writing this book. This garden brings seekers from all over the world, who believe that Jesus came there to be taught the wisdom of the Druids. They were there to be blessed by the waters of the Chalice Well. I went to the wellhead by myself. In the silence and beauty, I was overwhelmed by a desire to dedicate my life to listening to the cries of our suffering Earth and offering whatever solace I could in the form of gardens. Each one has become part of Our Sacred Garden: The Living Earth.
I believe that the planting of gardens, both in the soil and in the heart, is one deeply creative and healing action, which can enchant people of any culture, race, or belief. Indeed, the garden is a metaphor for healing both self and community. It is the exploration of the symbolic Sacred Garden; the original paradise of everyone’s dream; that place of lost myth and poetry, so needed today; a sanctuary of healing, color, and fragrances, of still and running waters; a source of fresh resolution in our hands and in ourselves by which we can transform the planet.
In retrospect, art and gardens and family have always been my life. Around me, I have always had the music, colors and fragrances of gardens. As a painter, shapes, lines and color are my language, weaving together a tapestry of living greens, flames, sapphires and prisms. Happiness, to me, is emerald and viridian; anger, a striated crimson; and inspiration, scarlet and gold.
At the age of three, I was kneeling with paper and crayons on the outdoor steps of our house in Boston. It was Thanksgiving Day. A huge inflated float of a pilgrim was being carried down Beacon Hill in front of us. “Turn around!” cried my family. I wouldn’t, as I was much too busy, finally able to draw the sideburns of a little boy. I had attempted this for days. Before long, drawing was my everyday life, along with radio and homework. Drawing portraits of teachers, fellow students and innumerable horses was more fun than boring classes at school.
Like a thunderclap, the shock of real art arrived when I saw my first prints by Braque, Picasso and Miro in my parent’s house in Washington, D.C. It was a jolt of pure pleasure when I realized what those artists were sharing with me. Soon thereafter, in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, there was Renoir’s “Dancers” in his world of dazzling color and light. After that, I proceeded on a journey through the eyes of Monet, Pizarro, and more Renoirs and on to the genius of Gauguin and Van Gogh. Now, some 60 years later, I recognize that my whole life has been inspired by spiritual lightning that caused me to absorb those avatars of form and color.
Down through the decades, I’ve learned that we can translate the meaning of gardens into our daily lives as places of inner radiance in our minds and hearts. We can nurture gardens of our soul and create places in which to build communities around planning, planting, and maintaining physical gardens.
Hopefully, this book will light the way for all of us.
– Adele Seronde
Southwest Coronation
To forget how to dig the earth and to tend the soil is to forget ourselves.
– Mahatma Gandhi
* * *
The many great gardens of the world, of literature and poetry, of painting and music, of religion and architecture, all make the point as clear as possible: The soul cannot thrive in the absence of a garden.
– Thomas Moore
PART I – What Are Sacred Gardens?
Your sacred space is where you can find yourself again and again.
– Joseph Campbell
* * *
Meanings of “Sacred”
The land of Uttarakura is watered by lakes with golden lotuses. There are rivers by thousands, full of leaves of the color of sapphire and lapis lazuli; and the lakes, resplendent like the morning sun, are adorned by golden beds of red lotus. The country all around is covered by jewels and precious stones, with gay beds of blue lotus, golden petalled. Instead of sand, pearls, gems and gold form the banks of the rivers, which are overhung with trees of fire-bright gold. These trees perpetually bear flowers and fruit, give forth a sweet fragrance and abound with birds.
– The Ramayana, one of the great Indian epics, circa. 1000 B.C.E.
What does this term “sacred” mean to me, to any of us who may, or may not, worship in a formal way? What does it mean to those of us who perceive the language of the Spirit in the stained-glass windows of Chartres or Notre Dame, or in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony? And what about those who find majesty in the great redwood forests, in the waterfalls, the mountains and on the grass-blown prairies?
Assuredly, one meaning of “sacred” is a person’s awareness of the reverence in the journey through life to find the soul’s domain, the life force or energy of God by whatever name. Similar journeys are immortalized in the world’s greatest literature: Arjuna’s battles in the Bhagavad-Gita, the enlightenment of Buddha, Noah’s Ark in the Bible, and the wanderings of Moses, his receiving of the Ten Commandments, and safeguarding them in the Ark of the Covenant.
Early morning light at Stonehenge, located in the English county of Wiltshire.
Entering the 21st century, are we still haunted by the symbolism of the Holy Grail? Do we have Parsivals among us today? Sailing countless miles into space, did not at least some of the astronauts see our planet of swirling blues and greens as a spiritual miracle of existence? This search for sacred gardens continues. To some seekers it means a blessed sanctuary or oasis, a cloister connected to a church or a monastery, a consecrated haven secure from violation. To others it may be a garden that’s always been dedicated to a spiritual energy in a site proclaimed as holy by a shaman, Druid or priest. And, today, it could be a place transformed by loving care into an area of beauty, a beloved place, nurturing to its keepers as well as to its visitors.
As for me, I believe every garden created by nature or by people has intrinsic elements of the sacred in it. These elements have been recognized as symbolic: the myths of the Garden of Eden or Shambhala, and as divine, such as the ancient oak groves of the Druids as places of worship. Also, cathedral cloisters or temple gardens offered sanctuaries or places where people could be integrated with the powers of nature. Each garden is sacred insofar as our love and attention have recognized it.
What is a sacred garden? It is a place of beauty and profundity. It is a place that brings a sense of the wild places of the world back into the heart of civilization; a place for the human soul to merge with the spirit of this Earth and renew the purpose of humanity. It is a place where the powerful magic of life itself seeps back into the soul; restoring the body and healing the fractured mind; a place of transformation and the emergence of a new, higher, more inclusive state of consciousness.
– Carol Horn
Every garden is a gateway to a state of mind. One can feel the urge to create one, to participate in nature’s endless cycle of germination, growth, flowering, fruiting, seeding, decaying and regenerating. This urge comes from a blessed place within, a sacred garden of the mind. If the image of this inner garden evokes delight, reverence and a sense of transcendent joy, it confers its magic. If nurturing and caring for the growing plants gives a person the whole attention of fingers and heart, this person may find his or her life transformed.
So it is that gardens are burgeoning everywhere today, in backyards or in courtyards, in converted city dumps, on state properties, in rural and urban settings. It is as if each person and each community is seeking ways to serve and to bring back some measure of reverence for the earth and into his or her own heart. By creating new gardens and preserving existing spaces of natural beauty, people have learned they can restore their bruised spirits and create sanctuaries—havens from the stress and pollution of the modern world.
There is no other
door to knowledge than the door nature opens; and there is no truth
except the truths we discover in nature.
– Luther Burbank
The Earth-Peace Garden
Imagine an overgrown field in dry Arizona surrounded by pinewoods, cacti and acacia being transformed by a small community of gardeners. This garden is bordered on one side by a dry, deep streambed, and by a steep mountain bank on the other. Visualize a quiet resting place, a pavilion for prayer or contemplation or for simply reveling in the majesty of the red sandstone rock escarpments and higher cliffs and ponderosa pine forests.
Visualize the work these gardeners undertook to encourage this six-acre wildness into a garden of love and quiet beauty—their small sacred garden! First, there was the transplanting of cacti from the potential pavilion site to the mountain bank; then came months of Saturdays when volunteers of all ages and my backbone crew of adults, my children and grandchildren, even great-grandchildren, all came to help. Next, they cleared land, spread new soil, raked out stones, carried rocks of all sizes to the mountainside bank. There they created a rock garden with wild blue verbenas, orange globe mallow and stands of cat claw, mesquite and yellow-flowered barberry. Next, they picked each flagstone for the terrace around the pavilion and, for the pathways, laid the concrete in which to place them week-by-week. After some welcome rain, the old field became a growing space to receive wild purple asters, desert marigolds and white horsenettles; daffodils and purple robe, penstemons and iris smiled on the terrace borders.
With hand-collected rocks, a Navajo working crew of young volunteers prepares stone walkways in the Earth-Peace Garden in Sedona, Arizona.
This beloved space is dedicated to Shirley Caris, founder of the Sedona Creative Life Center, and also to the 17th Karmapa of Tibet, His Holiness Gyalwang Karmapa Ogyen Trinley Dorje, and a twin spiritual soul of the Dalai Lama.
If this little garden in Arizona can become a sanctuary, a place where these red sandstone mesas, pinion and juniper forests and diverse cacti form a quiet retreat for the visiting Karma and others, then those gardeners have been blessed to create a microcosm of the sacred garden, the Earth.
An open-air pavilion graces the center of the Garden. Much time and great care were taken to create beautiful places to walk and rest the eyes.
Across the seas from Arizona, perhaps Claude Monet’s extraordinary garden in Govern, France, remains one of the worlds most beloved and visited areas. Originally created by the painter to provide in nature the color contrasts he wanted to experience and transform on canvas, today it constitutes a gloriously lavish bouquet ranging from fiery scarlets and carmines through tangerines, oranges and lemons to every conceivable shade of blue and purple. With colors arranged in mini-environments, a huge tree trunk of linden is surrounded by white feathery baby’s breath, punctuated by crimson tulips. A tamarisk tree with weeping pink branches sets the tone for long alleys of stock, iris and variegated tulips. The water lily pond, whose blue-green and white tones Monet immortalized forever, is now contrapuntal in brilliant azaleas. The varieties of plantings and colors change from season to season, but the fiesta continues from April to November, with a necessary time for mulching in between. The love and awe visitors — and workers — bestow upon Monet’s dream is a microcosm of what sacred gardens around the world evoke.
Factors such as design, color, fragrance and sheer magnificence — and, most of all, the quality of care and love — all instill a sense of the sacred in some of the world’s better-known gardens. For example, in the Zen Gardens of Japan, each boulder or raked area of sand becomes a microcosm of a spiritual state of being.
A landscape, like a man or a woman, acquires character through time and endurance.
– Edward Abbey
Throughout the Middle East, in Greece, and across the countries around the Mediterranean Basin, in Islamic gardens and the Moorish Alhambra of Spain, there are inner courtyards with tiled pools. In bordering countries of Africa, the countless shade-cooled oases of the Sahara bring salvation and peace to weary travelers. Scotland’s magical west coast gardens — Crarae and Arduaine, the inspiring Inverewe garden, and Findhorn on the wild, windswept northeastern coast—create paradises on formerly damaged land. England, and Cornwall, in particular, offer many other extraordinary examples, such as Trebah, Trelissick, and Trengwainton gardens, and sacred wells such as Sancreed.
Japanese Garden
For its part, the North American continent has a number of legendary gardens: the Green Gulch Zen Center Gardens in Tassajara; California’s lush Huntington Gardens in San Marino; Mendocino Coast Botanical Gardens in Fort Bragg; Seattle and San Francisco’s Japanese Gardens; exotic Botanical Gardens in St. Louis, Missouri, and Phoenix, Arizona; the lovely, private gardens of Charleston, South Carolina, open to the public from time to time. In Mt. Desert Island, Maine, there is the Asticou Azalea Garden, which, each June, ignites with a blaze of fiery reds, crimsons, pinks, purples and whites.
In and around the area of Vancouver and Victoria in British Columbia, Canada, are many superb gardens, including the Dr. Sun Yat Sen Chinese Classical Garden in Queen Elizabeth Park, the University of British Columbia Botanical Garden, the Vandusen Botanical Garden and the famous Butchart Gardens on Vancouver Island.
On Washington’s Puget Sound, the exquisite Bloedel Preserve has sprouted on land formerly ravaged by logging and quarrying. As more and more people take on the sacred mission to rehabilitate polluted, gutted, strip-mined or clear-cut lands all over the world, Bloedel represents one of many such resurrections.
In Native American gardens across the United States, meanwhile, nature also provides living sacred gardens: forests, meadows, plains, deserts and mountains. In the dry Southwest, the Hopi and Pueblo people construct terraced gardens along the rocky slopes of their mesas and in broad valleys. Both they and the Navajo have developed ingenious “dry farming” methods, which provide healthful sustenance from corn, squash and beans within the limitations of their severely dry climate. The Hopi maintain orchards of fruit trees using this practice. To them and for many tribes farming is a mind-body experience.
Scenes from Vancouver gardens, clockwise from left: Springtime in Queen Elizabeth Park; Japanese maples in Vandusen Botanical Garden; pebbled courtyard in Dr. Sun Yat Sen Chinese Classical Garden.
It is not enough to understand the natural world; the point is to defend and preserve it.
– Edward Abbey
Our archetypal ancestors’ belief in the power of trees and in the spirits living in each flower, leaf and plant, was universal; it wove through everyday life and through their ceremonies. For their part, the Druids met in sacred oak groves; the laurel was the holy tree for Apollo’s followers; and the apple was the symbol of everlasting life—or beauty—or knowledge. All life was known to be sacred, and each ancient god-spirit ruled a particular domain of land or sea, river, forest, mountain, air and clouds. Humans are only a tiny part of a luminous universe, which we must learn to recognize, love and not destroy.
Pan, the goat-footed symbol of nature, was believed to be a powerful and seductive protector of all wild, courageous and beautiful nature. Back into our lives today, as a transformation of Pan, is the more poignant symbol of Gaia, the ancient mother-goddess of Earth, which many people now believe is the living being of the Earth itself. Pan is said to be alive still, leaping across our public lands, in and out of the orange and purple monoliths of Utah’s Zion and Arches national parks, sliding down the cliff-sides of Yosemite. His voice and footprints echo in each translucent tributary canyon off Lake Powell, down through the thundering rapids of the Colorado River.
His legendary spirit spreads across the immensity of the white sands of the world, into each desert unique in vibrant colors of rock, in the strange forms of cacti, in spires of radiant cliffs and swirling dust devils. Pan swims in the vast underwater wilderness gardens of the oceans; he touches the coral kingdoms and weaves among the sea anemones and floating weeds. All the exuberant forests of the planet feel his embrace; the mountains quiver and shake their manes of snow into the turbulence of falling waters. Each leaf and each alga, lichen, moss and mushroom of the wild gardens claims his love. They salute his presence in the growing and praise him with the sun.
These legendary oases of the spirit are worldwide. We celebrate them in our hearts and minds, in our literature, our dreams. They have names that bring into our minds cooling waterfalls, raked by sea waves of sand and wild fragrances: Yosemite, Kyoto, Niagara, Boboli and Versailles . . . Eden!
We need to know that all these manifestations of greening glory still exist, as well as how to protect them. We must acknowledge this beauty in our pores, our bones; we must save it, cherish it, nourish it; we must recreate it in a million brush strokes, sounds, movements, words and actions.
I am always glad to touch the living rock again and dip my hand in high mountain sky.
– John Muir
By recognizing the sacredness of our planet, our sacred garden, we discover the means of awakening the inherent beauty that is part of each of us and of confirming our responsibility to preserve and co-create with it.
* * *
Personal Awakening to the Sacred
In wildness is the preservation of the world.
– H. D. Thoreau
I believe that my soul must have been aware of the Earth gardens in which it flourished; however else could I, or any of us who have awakened to the magnificence which surrounds us, recognize the sacred nature of our quest? It is rarely taught in our schools or in our religious upbringings, but Eden lives in each of us as a sacred core waiting to be recognized.
Today, I live with my oldest son in a natural garden in the Southwest, an enchanted land my husband and I discovered and explored before he died. Our house sits at the base of thousand-foot sienna pink sandstone cliffs, with white limestone striations that dance in variegated forms against the pulsing light. At the base of these cliffs emerge outcroppings of pink and yellow-white rocks, covered with patches of blue and green lichen, surrounded by prickly pear and banana yucca, juniper, piñon and the varying greens of dozens of varieties of flowering shrubs and plants—all with protective spines. Here is a cliff rose with wild-strawberry-like blossoms of extraordinary fragrance; there, the spiky leaves and tall spires of scarlet bugler, as well as tiny outcroppings of wild, daisy-like cushions and locoweed, that wild purple lupine so poisonous to animals.
My son, Antoine Seronde
The untamed garden of this Arizona wilderness provides a terrain alive—still—with enchanting birds and animals: flocks of orange and black-hooded orioles, mountain bluebirds, larks, mockingbirds, canyon wrens, roadrunners, quail with nodding plumes, rust-sided towhees and juncos. Coyotes sing nightly on the ridges near the house and, in the dry season, deer, cottontail and jackrabbits, as well as javelina and foxes, find pools of water in our wash. We also have our quota of rattlers and bull snakes, scorpions and black widows, each essential to nature’s balance.
However, the garden most deeply rooted in my life is the garden that my children helped to create—the family vegetable garden in Maine. Over the years it has received untold tons of manure and compost, originally worked into the stony clay earth by a wonderful old man with an old hand plow. Now we have hands, hoes, mattocks and a modern Troy-Built rototiller. For three generations of family- us, our children and grandchildren - it has become a tradition that has held us together in a strong bond. Since the children were small (some 40-50 years ago), they have helped to weed, plant, pick and eat the long pole beans and peas, the New Zealand spinach and a variety of lettuce.
I have a passion for arugula; one daughter always includes nasturtiums, and mustards grow wild between the rows. The scents of freshly-mown hay and spruce forests, peonies, wild roses and sea-salt from the nearby bay pervade the woods and meadows. Fog and high-floating gulls, the wild stony beach with seals basking on the low-tide rocks and a family of bald eagles dominating the coastline with their huge spread-wing presences—these are the summer voices of that land.
I find working in a garden, especially weeding, a panacea for almost all ills. Sometimes, disgruntled by some quarrel or stress, I sit down on the earth or on a sweet-smelling garden-edge lawn. I lift handfuls of humus to my face and fill my nostrils with the poignant fragrance. A mindless happiness comes over me as I pull weeds, or transplant, caressing with my fingers each small green shoot, feeling love coming from the earth into my being. It is the most healing action I know.
There are two lasting bequests we can give our children: One is roots, the other is wings.
– Hodding Carter
Perhaps each of us is a garden filled with seeds, roots, potential stems, leaves, flowers—and weeds! Perhaps the seed in us is a soul, which has experienced many transitions in reincarnation.
Blue Summer Garden
We all search for our roots, where we have come from, who we are. I do know of my own roots, those extraordinary people who were my forebears: parents and grandparents who became sacred to me because of their sustained love and nourishment. This nurturing, and the diverse gardens they created, were inspirations that evoked this book.
In Glen Cove, Long Island, my maternal grandparents had a white garden filled with phlox, bellflowers, stock and candy tuft, absolutely heady with scent but monotonously white. Stone steps descended into grass walkways among the white rectangles; beyond, a great expanse of dark oak forest with huge trees which were filled with crows and calling jays. Clouds of butterflies fluttered in that garden—skippers, huge yellow and blue and black striped swallowtails and monarchs that would sometimes land on my finger.
When I was nine, I spent a summer at my grandparents’ house. That summer was filled with the blue haze of light and the mingled scents of boxwood and salt spray from Long Island Sound, newly mown grass and damp oak leaves. The atmosphere shared the same blue haze and delight of Beatrix Potter’s stories—her world of gardens filled with animals and birds mingled happily with mine. My world there was populated with butterflies, an army of beetles, a praying mantis and even a gorgeous Luna moth. It clung to the front-door screen, a fragile and enormous, lime-colored shadow-being.
Those who dwell among the beauties and mysteries of the earth are never alone or weary of life.
– Rachel Carson
And those grandparents! What presences! My grandmother—tall, imperious, her white hair piled high around her formidable but homely face—dominated that household as she filled every room with vases of flowers—huge masses of peonies, syringa, phlox and zinnias—whatever was in season—which permeated the air and our lives with fragrance. She spent hours arranging these flowers, and every table had its bouquet. These colored splashes are happily mixed in my mind with the varicolored Venetian glasses for orange juice, the brilliant Persian carpets and especially the bright-blue Chinese rug in my grandfather’s library.
My grandfather was a very different kind of person—reserved, and quiet, who inevitably gave in to my grandmother. He adored my younger brother, and the two heads—one white, the other coppery red—would be seen bending over interminable games of cards or backgammon. Once, Grandpa called my brother and me to follow him out from my grandmother’s sight. Furtively, he led us to his bedroom closet, where, from a special hiding place, he withdrew three pieces of Blackjack bubble gum, which we all chewed vigorously, bubbling at each other with suppressed giggles as we gave off powerful licorice fumes.
A portrait of my mother hung in my grandmother’s room. She was painted in a flat, Japanese manner but with a luminous yellow background, seen more often in contemporary Western art. Her hair flamed orange-gold against it. She held a gold-filigreed fan and her face was very pale and serene. There was a great silence, a still radiance in that portrait by Henry Dirth. It echoed my mother’s fragrances: earth-mulch, rose petals, pine needles, chiffon handkerchiefs laced with Chanel No. 5. For me, my mother reigned as a kind of goddess. She was both an elegant grande dame and an earthy peasant. I can still see her floating out the front door in a long apricot-colored evening dress, on my father’s arm, to yet another dinner.
THE ORANGE PRINCESS
my mother
the
princess
wove
sunlight of high stars
her lamb’s wool
touch
brick dust and twirling chimney pots
through panes of
smiles
the cobbled alleyway holding
horsechestnut burrs and
coal dust
on the snow
late afternoon tea
with high-pitched
friends
oasis in the downstairs
pantry
letters
colors
furs
Chanel
and moth flakes
into
a green-gold skein cocoon
the monarch flies
five oceans
seeking
prayer wheels
to find
her green-gold tree
~
In a different part of Long Island, East Hampton, there was another sacred garden, this one belonging to my father’s parents, both of them portrait painters, muralists and garden artists. It was bathed in blue light and salt sea-smell mixed with the musky green odor of the nearby lake. Formal circles of orange zinnias surrounded a fishpond filled with goldfish and lily pads in front of the house, and waves of orange trumpet vines climbed the house’s stucco walls. Behind, looking down to the lake, was a terrace scented with white and purple-blue petunias in huge pots, placed on low terrace walls. A wide staircase led down to the lake, where swans fed in the murky, midsummer water. In this paradise I ran wild and barefoot over acres of green lawn between hydrangea bushes with huge blue blossoms, swarms of mosquitoes following. I couldn’t have been more than three or four, a princess in an enchanted fairy tale.
Adele Seronde
These artist grandparents were gentle, remote people, whom I remember particularly through color. My grandmother, always swathed in a diaphanous greenish-blue or purplish printed gown, presided over tea and cookies on the petunia terrace. She spent her mornings painting, usually a still life of flowers. Very early in my life, I began to recognize those flower paintings, swirling in light and pastel colors; she too, had seen early works of Monet and Renoir and had absorbed the color scale of the Impressionists. When I was older, I learned she was also an accomplished portraitist.
I married young to a doctor whose deepest love was marine biology and who was an ecologist long before the word became fashionable. If he could have relived his life, it might have been as an explorer of wilderness, of the long rivers in the pristine canvases of Albert Bierstadt or Remington, of the domains of elk and grizzly, the direct enchantments for a naturalist. His real passion was always for live animals—creatures of every species, their customs, foods and living habitats.
As a pathologist, he was a born teacher, and spent years educating medical students. He also taught his love for exploration of mountains, woods and wilderness to each of our five children.
The whole world of nature was his garden.
My husband Joe and I
A PRINCE
There is a prince
moving
in the gray
and shadowed forest of my heart.
In him the wild
deer stray
and song of thrush a silver spiral
of his love.
He
treads as noiseless over pine-needles
as sunlight,
nor will he
break the threads
of spiders
crossing in the dew.
No twig
nor moss displaced,
he heals my heart
with browns and fragile
greens
of lichens and wet ferns.
I lie beneath the leaves.
He
waits in patience
for my rebirth.
~
My father, Christian A. Herter
My father, like my grandparents and mother, grew up surrounded by flowers and gardens, color and painting, and this ambiance wove through his life. He loved to direct and plan; he oversaw all the planting and harvesting at our farm where we spent every weekend, but because of severe arthritis, he did not help with the physical labor.
One of the most important garden domains of all our lives was a plantation called Cheeha-Combahee, in South Carolina, which my mother’s parents had bought during the Great Depression. This land offered us a unique territory of twelve thousand acres supporting huge moss-draped live oaks, wild lowlands covered with various pines and hardwoods, masses of dogwood blossoms in spring, oaks festooned with wisteria and jasmine. Our low-slung ranch house stood on a point overlooking miles of yellow-grassed marshlands in between two winding silver rivers, the Cheeha and the Combahee, from which the plantation took its name.
This plantation was my father’s ideal place for his experimental planning. He had ambitious visions for what could be made of this land economically: pine trees for lumber, oak forests rattling with acorns for pigs, converted marshlands in one area for cattle and other marshlands for rice. He spent time working with the University of South Carolina on an experimental idea to turn the rich delta land, divided by brackish-water estuaries, into feeding ground. First, one needed to dynamite ditches to carry off the saltwater; then, with a huge backhoe on tractor treads, turn over the alluvial soil until it was ready for planting sturdy grasses; then, pasture sun-resistant Brahma cattle on the land.
Everything changes, and nothing is more vulnerable than the beautiful.
– Edward Abbey
On paper it sounded marvelous and precedent setting. But nature did not cooperate. Hurricanes came and flooded the dikes and levees that had been built to support the drainage ditches; screw-worms came and bred in the eyes of the cattle and pigs. A hurricane flattened a large percentage of the standing timber. The rice crop had its own desolate history. We bought an oversized picking and threshing machine to replace the expensive workers who had previously harvested the rice. But that year the rains were so extensive that the rice grew to sequoia-like proportions and that machine sank helplessly into the mud. Perhaps all these disasters were a heaven-sent retribution for our man-made tampering with nature’s basic design. We know now that all those marshes serve special purposes: for holding the silts and rich bottom lands that were being swept to the sea by the rivers and rains; for providing refuge to enormous varieties of migrating birds, as well as a home for crustaceans and shellfish, crabs, shrimp and oysters, and for myriads of insects. In those days we took for granted the bounty of ocean marshlands; today—after developers and sewage plants, garbage fills and malls have invaded these swamps—we are only beginning to recognize our worldwide losses.
FATHER
Tall man, tall elm
leaning
into a high sky,
bent with disease and dying
but
still with arms outstretched
he stood
at the roadside of the
whole world.
Ideas grew tall then too,
living in groves,
touching limbs
and exchanging leaves.
Most have been cut down
since,
and no Druids guard
our seers.
He stayed rooted
believing
that men could change men
through gardening of
self;
he touched others with green,
sought substance of
water
and soil of each person’s worth
to bring fruit.
Elms,
like chestnuts,
are passing,
and nobody knows
what they
meant to our growing
or language,
the girth of the timber
or
how – in the heat of ungrateful worlds’
turning –
they
gave shade.
~
Attracted by my father’s professional life, 1 a diverse group of people visited the Cheeha-Combahee plantation over the years—statesmen, diplomats, politicians, writers, artists, lawyers—all drawn together ostensibly for a week of shooting—but, in reality, for a week of communication, of refuge from a distraught world. My mother, as their hostess, was the very spirit of the blue haze and light, filtering through the Spanish moss, the breadth and sweep of those far marshes and distant blue islands. She was one of the central loves of my life, and a grounding for my soul.
The Far Marshesand Spanish Moss
Father had a dedication to forming, through just treaties and laws, a more compassionate world willing to share its knowledge and its wealth. After years of traveling, of meeting with both domestic and foreign leaders to help solve problems of enough foods and fuels to live by, he taught us that, if we had ideas, we must take responsibility for implementing them. Public service was part of that responsibility.
Both my mother and my father contributed their passion and commitment to all of us, their children.
To know oneself, one should assert oneself.
– Albert Camus
1 See Appendix: Biography of my father, Christian A. Herter, p. 186.
* * *
The Need for Gardens Made Sacred by Love
I’m going to leave a heart in the earth so that it may grow and flower and adore everything green.
– Rosario Murillo
All of these gardens in my life are sacred to me through the love I have received from them. I have invested all my working energy to share this love with the world around me.
My early world was centered in Boston, Massachusetts. There, many years later, I recognized that there are gardens everywhere needing to be loved, to become sacred to their users. For instance, many of the landscaped grounds around former state hospitals for the mentally ill have been turned into community gardens: small parcels brimming with sunflowers, vegetables and marigolds. Elsewhere in the U.S., abandoned lands have been transformed into sanctuaries where people suffering from illness and substance abuse can work in the earth, becoming part of a living garden that offers the path back to health.
And how is this to be accomplished?
At home, many have started to heal souls by taking time to nurture even one beautiful plant on a windowsill, or scooping a small hole in the earth for a seedling or tree. Listening to, and really looking at, that seedling, flower or tree, touching it, smelling its fragrance. These can be direct ways of absorbing its beauty into our being. This can start the process of personal healing. Our attention to that plant is a prayer from the heart, an opening of ourselves to love and compassion, to caring, “our hearts with pleasure fill,” as Wordsworth put it. It is a step toward changing our attitudes.
Gated garden walkway
For decades, even for centuries, gardens created sanctuaries in denaturalized, dehumanized urban communities as well as in intimate flowering oases at convalescent homes, hospitals or nursery schools. Gardens, no matter how small, offer protection and food for the spirit as small sanctuaries, as vest-pocket parks; as courtyards in schools, private homes or business complexes; as wayside gardens with seats for travelers or as garden “tot-lots” for little children and their mothers.
In particular, our cities especially need intimate, protected retreats made beautiful by plantings and water and works of art. The Museum of Modern Art in New York City once hosted a Japanese house on a quarter-acre of its sculpture garden as a temporary exhibit. The house with its garden, was surrounded by a high wall covered with vines. Water, diverted into a stream, flowed beside the sliding doors of the living room. Opposite, about ten feet away, was a high landscaped wall. One day I found myself there in its tiny world of trellised vines, flowers, clumps of bamboo, with fern and iris bordering the stream. No one among the visitors spoke. Sitting by the stream, we watched the clouds and the tops of the skyscrapers and, for a blessed few minutes of utter relaxation, we escaped the city’s noise and haste. What a delightful anomaly it was to see New Yorkers with beatific expressions on their faces!
Not just in museums do gardens serve as buffers; they can envelop us in a visual harmony of silence. As the plant kingdom formed a tapestry of green, of music and mirage for our ancestors, so do gardens weave strands of green poetry throughout our lives. At the very least, they can provide screens between us, and the harshness and noise of modern life; at the most. These are a real antidote to everyday stress, to despair. Indeed, certain portions of parks or specially designated rooms in schools or convention hotels are increasingly active as demarcation zones for urban dwellers, offering momentary escape and serenity. Such an oasis in an otherwise alien world is Paley Park in Manhattan, with its waterfall drowning out the sound of sirens and the sharp reports of horns and squealing brakes.
For the moon, the rocks, the land, our hope—these, I feel, shall endure.
– William Davis
My own oasis as a child, on the family farm in Massachusetts, was a tiny clearing in the clay pit swamps, which I reached via homemade causeways of long branches stretching from grass hummock to hummock above swampy water. From my hideaway I could sit with my back against a pine and survey the expanses of marsh: the bulrushes and cattails, swamp maples and the swimming pairs of ducks and the occasional Canada geese. Most of my time there was spent simply daydreaming, breathing in the scent of the pine needles and that marsh-wet earth beneath, somehow healing the hurts of school.
Many years later I was hospitalized twice in Concord, Massachusetts. The first time I was struck by how extraordinarily quiet my room was, protected from the busy highway by a double row of huge white pines, nearly as secluded as my childhood oasis. The second time, two years later, every car was audible and every screech of tires or honking horn; the pine trees had all been cut down to enlarge the parking lot. The resultant noise was a physically disturbing incessant static, which must have subliminally affected each patient and member of the staff.
A few years ago, I went to the Addison Gallery in Andover, Massachusetts, where its director, Bart Hayes, had mounted an exhibition that isolated the senses of sight, sound and touch, each to be experienced at a separate time. I participated in the exhibit pertaining to sound, traveling first through a wind tunnel into a darkened two-room space. Surrounding us were noisy examples of everyday static—roars of jet airplanes, intermittent traffic droning and the occasional wail of a far train. In both rooms, speakers emitted individual sounds: waves crashing on a beach, a gunshot, automobile whines, horses’ hooves, pounding.
For a few moments, while listening to a speaker, I was totally immersed in a world of memory and surprised at the shock each individual sound evoked. When I heard a birdsong, a particular white-throated sparrow, I burst into tears. The vision of Mt. Washington’s forests and high alpine meadows where white-throats—almost never heard now—call to each other, and the thought of the whole lost world of vanishing species reduced me to an indescribable sadness.
The sedge is wither’d from the lake, And no birds sing.
– John Keats
How could I have been so shaken? It was that complete concentration on one isolated phrase of sound; no distractions, no static, no escape! I had to hear. It is what we all need: to hear something we love with our entire being—its unique message, its urgent exorcism. As that white-throat was metaphor for a whole lost vision, so too can a garden evoke the reality of a Shangri-La.
From coast to coast, in cities large and small, because of the traffic noise, many people may no longer hear the songs of the lark or the robin; because of the increasing ugliness and attendant smog of our surroundings, we’re too distracted to see the sunset, the stars, the moon and the trees. The static, unwanted dissonant sound so deafens us that we do not hear our inner selves.
Nowadays, more and more children express their need for a buffer. Unaware of the experience of physical gardens, they protect their inner gardens with screens of music, I-Pods, or sometimes, drugs. The fact is that, whatever our ages, we all need places of refuge, of sanctuary—an oasis of the soul. Hope, however, is a reality, not just a chimera. In the summer of 2008, record numbers of college students left big cities behind and signed up to work on farms and truck gardens. “Welcome them,” a Nebraska farmer told a reporter. “We all hope this trend is more than a political statement. We need the young ‘uns. We need more farms. Are times truly changing?”
Long ago in Europe, the monasteries of the Dark Ages acted as havens, refuges and places of escape from the depredations of warring tribes and invasions, as well as places of physical and spiritual nourishment, order and harmony. Here, the passion and philosophy of the early Christian church thrived alongside the classics of Greek and Roman thought and literature, which were stored, absorbed and incorporated into the compost that nourished the growing garden of Western thought. The men and women of the monasteries were gardeners and, also, guardians of human aspirations, preservers of a body of knowledge, illuminations and spiritual doctrine.
If you see no reason for giving thanks, the fault lies in yourself.
– Tecumseh of the Shawnees
Today’s monasteries are the churches, synagogues, mosques, Quaker meeting halls, libraries, colleges and foundations, some of which collect, preserve and expand our knowledge while acting as spiritual sanctuaries in our strife-torn society. The challenge of preserving and enhancing our intellectual and spiritual life has fallen to the all-encompassing Internet; the whole world may benefit. In addition, there are small communities all over the world that function as sanctuaries for thought and spiritual enlightenment.
One such oasis of the spirit was a Benedictine Monastery in Morocco called Toumliline, now a leprosarium but once a deep testament to Christian faith and healing. A friend and I decided to visit there because of an initial, extraordinary meeting with one of its monks, Père Placide. It was he who informed us that the role of the monks at Toumliline was to bridge the widening gap between feudal-thinking elders and their rebellious children. Also, he said there was work to be done to expand the overall economy, such as strengthening their schools with reinforced concrete so that they wouldn’t disintegrate when the spring rains arrived. He invited us to take part in the life of his monastery, during which time annual seminars were held about new ideas and methods to improve conditions throughout Africa.
During those two weeks, we visited the local markets, helped teach village children, who rewarded our crayon-and-paper escapades with a concerto played on homemade instruments: ocarinas, combs, pots, pans and whistles!
We journeyed to a ksar (town) at the Sahara’s edge, saw the children riding Arabian horses in from the desert, and watched the threshing of wheat by teams of two mules and three horses pushing a stone wheel round and round. We met the village chieftain in a special ceremony. He was a Berber dressed in a white djellaba and turban, sitting cross-legged on a deep red carpet in a cave-like throne room.