Human Flower Project

Monday, November 17, 2008

Gethsemani’s Ginkgo Tree

An ancient golden tree lights up the inner man. Allen Bush, traveling to the Trappist Abbey of Gethsemani, finds a gift from Japan and a garden inspired by it.

Leaves of Ginkgo biloba
Photo: Allen Bush

By Allen Bush

There is in all visible things an invisible fecundity, a dimmed light, a meek namelessness, a hidden wholeness. This mysterious Unity and Integrity is Wisdom, the Mother of All, Natura Naturans…
Thomas Merton

I didn’t expect a whole lot this fall. We had scarcely any rain for three months and there wasn’t a hint of color by mid-October. I imagined the leaves in our garden would turn brown and that would be it. But there was a good soaker one Friday evening and overnight a steady unveiling kicked-off a brilliant show for two weeks. The colors kept getting better and better.  The sassafras was red and orange, the big dogwood was burgundy and a strong-growing golden larch was golden-brown. I waited on my little fifteen year old ginkgo to turn yellow and wondered about an unforgettable ginkgo that I hadn’t seen in seventeen years.

40 Buddhist and Catholic monastics at an interfaith dialogue on the environment gathered beneath the ginkgo in June 2008
Photo: Sravasti Abbey

I don’t remember seeing the Ginkgo on my first trip to the Trappist Abbey of Gethsemani with the Schwartzels in the mid-1950s. My recollection of the place is a little fuzzy. I was only five or six. There wasn’t anything exotically Catholic. I don’t remember chanting monks or burning incense. But I never forgot how the church’s thick stained glass filtered bright sunlight into gloomy darkness.

In January 1986, I drove to the Abbey with my friend, filmmaker Morgan Atkinson, and I wasn’t sure I was returning to the same place.

Faded memories do funny things. As a little boy, about the same time as my initial visit to Gethsemani, I had my first slice of a sweet pie – a taste I would never forget—and whose name I didn’t learn right away. I had my second piece of – what turned out to be - rhubarb pie, in my thirties, and was overcome with joy and discovery. A moment of piety and pie.

Morgan and I drove through Bardstown, south of Louisville, past the rolling Bluegrass countryside, and came along a huge walled compound sitting on the hillside that resembled a castle fortress. The place seemed strangely familiar. A large church stood above all the rest. Inside, tall, stark white walls seemed so bright and airy. It felt more nurturing than I remembered. I wasn’t sure what I’d seen with the Joe and Gerard, the Schwartzel boys. This wasn’t it.

(I later came across old photos in Dianne Aprile’s The Abbey of Gethsemani:  Place of Peace and Paradox that showed the menacing Gothic look and “deeply hued Munich windows” I had remembered. These were replaced in the early 1960s in a modern “brutalist” makeover that laid bare a handsome, skeletal structure, whose brick walls were blessedly painted white.)

Morgan and I wandered outside, and peered through the closed gates into the front garden. I saw one of the most spectacular ginkgoes I’d ever seen. (There is an even bigger Ginkgo biloba in Cave Hill Cemetery, just a few miles from our home in Louisville.) I wanted to go inside, touch the trunk and stare into its broad canopy. (The fan-shaped leaves often turn bright yellow in October or early November and cascade to the ground in a day or two. The colorful carpet stretches to the tree’s drip line. The season finale should never be hastily wasted by a leaf blower.)

The Ginkgo at the Abbey of Gethsemani, Nelson County, Kentucky
Photo: Brother Paul Quenon

Fossil evidence proves Ginkgoes existed 270 million years ago, and they grew over much of the world until being virtually eliminated by the ice age, perhaps surviving only in China. Buddhist monks took seeds or plants to Japan in the 1100s and in 1691 the tree was “discovered” there by Englebert Kaempfer, a German botanist, who was working in Japan for the East-India trading company. The first seeds of the living fossil were planted in Utrecht, Holland, possibly as early as 1730 and by 1784 in Philadelphia.

I wrote a letter the next week to the Abbey with questions about the ginkgo. I addressed the letter to: The Gardener at the Abbey of Gethsemani—not sure I’d get a response. I wondered if anyone knew when this ginkgo was planted or had any idea where it came from. Was it a female ginkgo that would produce fruit, prized by Asians but seldom touched by westerners who are repulsed by the stinky, fleshy pulp?  (Most commercial cultivars are males and bear no fruit). And I wondered, but didn’t ask (I thought it impolite) if Thomas Merton, writer, poet, artist and Gethsemani’s best known monk, paid any attention to the tree.

Brother Harold, 1991
Photo: Allen Bush

Two months later I got a letter dated March 2, 1986.

“Dear Mr. Bush (Allen),” Brother Harold wrote, “It (ginkgo) has been a favorite of mine for the twenty–five years I have lived here…

“The man responsible for it [the ginkgo] turns out to be the 4th Abbot of this monastery, Rev. Edmund Olbrecht – who was administrator of the Abbey from 1898 – 1935. His story is a colorful one in regard to both his personality and his administrative talents. In 1912 – 1913, he was appointed by the government body of our order to make official ‘visitations’ of houses (monasteries) of our order in China and Japan…His biography admits that he crossed the Atlantic 161 times on business of the Order (by boat). While in Japan, it seems he charmed the government officials he befriended and they made him an ‘Honorary Member of the Japanese Empire.’ It was they, I presume, who gave him the ginkgo seedling to bring back to the monastery. He arrived back here on February 20, 1913…The information source for this gift of the ginkgo tree is not mentioned in the biography – but from the 6th Abbot of Gethsemani [Dom James Fox] who is still with us at 87 years old and is a retired Abbot. He heard the story directly from Abbot Edmund….Our tree however is a male (I’ve seen the pollen cones years ago) so there will be no smelly fruit on the ground. There are some female trees over at the Motherhouse of the Sisters of Nazareth, near Bardstown.”

Peace in ‘The Tree of Life’

Brother Harold (Thibodeau)”

Brother Harold invited me to visit but I didn’t make good on his kind offer until a hot and humid Friday in late May 1991. I met Harold for lunch at the Abbey’s retreat guest house. White flowering Chinese tree lilacs (Syringa reticulata) were in bloom outside. He enjoyed gardening and I was surprised at his interest in fancy daylily cultivars; something I imagined might be a little too frivolous, and pricey, for a monk. Harold winked and reminded me that the flower buds were edible. “Ah, a man of expensive tastes,” I joked. 

What remains of Thomas Merton’s Zen garden, 1991, Abbey of Gethsemani
Photo: Allen Bush

We walked through the gates after lunch to admire the ginkgo. I touched its furrowed bark and was moved by its solemn presence. For a moment, I didn’t know where I was. The spell of uncertainty and clarity resumed a few minutes later when Harold took me around the back of the monks’ living quarters and showed me Thomas Merton’s little known Zen garden – or what was left of it. I was surprised. This was the first I’d heard of the garden and it was astounding. I was somewhere beautiful, joyously lost in the wilderness. I stood there with Brother Harold and saw this little forsaken patch with a few pitiful plants and felt a fathomable spirit. Did Harold know this? I was afraid to ask. We enjoyed a few quiet minutes and I was ushered away.

Author’s Note: Merton acknowledges the ginkgo, In The Sign of Jonas after he administers his first communion following his ordination as a priest, seven years after entering Gethsemani. “And after the mass I had plenty of time to make a good thanksgiving by myself at Our Lady of Victories altar and after that I went out and talked, or rather Someone talked through me. It was a marvelous morning under the tree that Father Mauritius once marked Ginkgo biloba, though all the botanical signs are now gone.”

The Ginkgo of Gethsemani
Photo: Brother Paul Quenon

Roger Lipsey will provide revealing details and provocative thoughts in an article entitled “In the Zen Garden of the Lord: Thomas Merton’s Stone Garden,” publication forthcoming. Thomas Merton’s interest in Zen Buddhism developed several years before the 1963 Zen garden construction. Lipsey traces the beginning: “In 1959, Merton had written as follows to his mentor in Zen, Dr (D.T.) Suzuki: ‘I only wish there were some way I could come in contact with some very elementary Zen discipline, even it were only like archery or flower arrangement.’ What he found was a brush and ink calligraphy, a quiet way of being in nature, a quiet way of meditation – and gardening.”

Morgan Atkinson’s film Soul Searching: The Journey of Thomas Merton will be televised December 14th on PBS. A book also entitled Soul Searching has just been published that includes extended film interviews and commentary from Atkinson.

Sunday, November 16, 2008

David Moffitt:  Marigold Missionary

One raised bed, one overheard conversation, and a New York man spreads doughnut-sized marigolds across the land.

Barb and Dave Moffitt of Cortland, NY, and the ‘donor bed’
that launched 2000 marigold seed packets
Photo: Courtesy David Moffett

“The purpose of the raised beds was originally for vegetables to sell on our stand, but I gave into my wife’s desire for flowers.”

Just that little slip and David Moffitt shot himself out of a cannon, instigating a nationwide human flower project that’s clearly caught the seat of his pants on fire. (See that streak of marigold-orange?)

Moffitt and his wife, Barb, live in Cortland, New York, and belong to plantcycle, an Ottawa, Ontario, based group that exchanges plants, seeds, gardening tools and tips. There’s only one hitch: “Everything Must be Free!” In other words, David was wise to seed swapping and passalong plants when his marigold opportunity arrived.

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Thursday, November 13, 2008

The Florists of Telegraph Avenue

The Local Ecologist turns ethnographer. Georgia Silvera Seamans cruises from Oakland to Berkeley and finds flower shops going strong, gone, and converted along Telegraph Avenue.

A former flower shop in Oakland, now an art gallery
Photo: Georgia Silvera Seamans

Running four and a half miles, from downtown Oakland, California, to the southern edge of the Berkeley ("Cal") campus, Telegraph Avenue is a beaten—some might even say battered—trail. Oakland’s first horsecar operated here, and in 1858 that town’s first telegraph went up along the route—thus its name.

Georgia Silvera Seamans, scholar of cities and local ecologist, made a recent inventory of the flower shops along Telegraph Avenue. Her inspired photo-essay shows some of the differences between Oakland and Berkeley and the ironies of this urban thoroughfare, which somehow manages to be both a tourist destination and a struggling commercial district, blessed and blighted at the same time.

Georgia reports:

“On Telegraph Avenue, a road that runs through Berkeley and Oakland, there are several flower shops.  The ones in Oakland are big stores while the ones in Berkeley are small, edge of the sidewalk shops.

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Tuesday, November 11, 2008

A Garden at the Top of the World

Jim Wandersee and Renee Clary don’t miss much, including a chance to see the world’s northernmost botanic garden, in Tromso, Norway. It’s closed for the next six months, but thanks to the EarthScholars, we visit today.

Himalayan Blue Poppy (Meconopsis sp.)
Tromso Arctic-Alpine Botanic Garden
Photo: EarthScholars™ Research Group

By James H. Wandersee and Renee M. Clary
EarthScholars™ Research Group

This past August we were working in Oslo, so only a thousand miles away.... We just had to see it—the world’s northernmost botanic garden!  The Tromso Arctic-Alpine Botanic Garden is, at least in our estimation, the 8th wonder of the botanic world.

Can Tromso, Norway, really stake claim to the world’s northernmost botanic garden? Yes. It is farther north than its two closest competitors—the Polar-Alpine Botanic Garden at Kirovsk in Russia and the Akureyri Botanic Garden in Iceland. For US readers’ geographical comparison, Tromso’s Botanic Garden lies at approximately the same latitude as the northernmost point in Alaska: Point Barrow.

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