Plants Are For People
In the last three weeks I have been visited by about thirty friends from distant places dating back over thirty years. Some of them I don’t even remember not knowing and even though I hadn’t seen some in five to ten years it seemed as though a single day had not passed. Most have married or should have been allowed to, and some we here to see one get married. About the only thing that was different was some of us were a little softer physically and mentally. However none of us were any softer in our passions. When you get a group of artists, musicians, chefs, designers, and gardeners together you know you are in for aesthetic overload. I have to thank Michael and Anita for choosing Asheville as the location for their special day. There couldn’t have been anyplace more appropriate for such a reunion.
It was definitely a spiritual time and this in particular is a spiritual time of year for me. Lately I have been completely enthralled in my writing for the update, but I have also been rediscovering my camera. Two days a week I have been spending in the field capturing what has probably been the best blooming season I have ever encountered. This has allowed me to capture from bud to bloom to leaf and to seed hundreds of varieties of plants. In the process it has reconnected me to the people who introduced me to some of the plants, and the people I introduced the plants to. This has been a true rediscovery of myself and I can never thank enough the people that have allowed this happen, just like I can never thank enough the people who first made these introductions to me. There is an old saying that it is bad luck to thank someone for giving you a plant, you just give them one back and give one to someone else. Gardening is without a doubt about giving and bringing people together rather than thanking them and going on your way. Things and people always seem to keep coming around like the seasons in a garden.
This spring has also allowed me to reconnect with people I have never met. In my excursions I have visited private and public gardens as well as nature herself. I have even just cruised neighborhoods scoping out that one missing specimen. Twenty years ago this is how I first honed my craft with mentors and friends like Duane Hoover of the Kaufmann Gardens and so many others. However no one made me better understand my craft better than those I studied that came before me. Tommy Church, George Kessler, Frank Lloyd Wright and John Brookes are some of my favorites, but nothing influenced me more than the biography of Fredrick Law Olmsted. I had read books about his work, but this was the first one that was really about him. It is no garden book. It reads more like a Western novel about someone who eventually found his was in a garden, and he was always the first to admit that he was not a Landscape Architect, just a lover of the arts and the land. As a product of the liberal arts myself, I always related to him the most.
This spring I have been spending two days a week scouring the grounds of The Biltmore Estate, camera in hand and brain in the clouds. Like the kid I was learning my craft in the parks of Kessler, and finding my way in the gardens I was creating, it is like Olmsted and I are connecting again after all these years and no time has passed. Along the way I continue to meet new people as they find me crawling out from under a plant, trying to get that perfect picture of the bark. Every once in awhile when I look beyond the picturesque gardens and soak in the pastoral, I realize Olmsted put that there too and I continue to meet new plants. There is no one more responsible for the introduction of some the worst invasive species to these mountains than Mr. Olmsted, but I have not doubt he loved the land as much as I do.
I am sure that if he knew then what we know now, he would have moved from defining sustainability as related to money, to creating things that are sustainable without it. He saw the plants as a palet to fulfill the visions of his designs, strong in Architecture, but grounded in the patterns of nature. They were like the books on a shelf or the art on a wall and he brought a greater appreciation of them to all of us. He saw sustainability as a plan to care for the land buy using it to generate the money to pay for the art. I am sure if he were alive today, he would see that the plants need to take care of the land so we don’t have to plunder it to pay for the gardens we create. In the end, he made us more aware. He just wasn’t aware of the consequences of his actions, but without them we would not have come to the awareness we have today.
As I near submission of the next update, I will not jinx things and thank Mr. Olmsted, Oregon State University or the University of Arizona, but I will be sure and give them some plants back. Most importantly, I’ll be sure and share them with others, because plants and people definitely go together. In the end, without growing together we will never learn together.
