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Dear Randy,
I want to talk about the Garden post-derecho. First let me start by thanking the Garden Conservancy and 61 individuals who responded to our request for financial assistance to aid the cleanup, donating over $15,000 to the cause. This generous support is so gratifying. It’s easy after living with the damage from a severe weather event to feel downtrodden. The response from our community of supporters lifted all of our spirits and also greatly lessened the blow to our budget. With your help we were able to purchase four shade cloths to replace the ones that were ripped by the winds. Your donations also paid for an arborist to work for three full days in the Garden, and for other crews to cut down and haul trees and branches. Thanks to the hard work of Adolfo, Ricardo, Agustin, and Luke, the publicly accessible part of the Garden has been cleaned up. We’ll be planting some replacement trees when the weather cools in the fall. For now, we’re adjusting to the increased amount of light and space in the Garden. Though those of us who spend almost every day here notice the difference, I imagine most visitors to the Garden will not be as shocked by the current state of the Garden as one, including me, might have suspected after looking at the images taken immediately after the storm. The rare Quercus sp. (above) that was collected in Mexico was completely toppled. We raised it back up and then it blew down again. While down for the second time we cut it and then put the stump upright and as you can see, it's producing a number of suckers. For it and a few other trees, it will be wait and see.
As I've mentioned before, it’s helpful to remember that the Garden owes its singularity, in large part, to another extreme weather event - a tornado - in 1983. John and Carl responded to the reality of the Garden's condition after the tornado and started researching native Texas plants that would thrive in the newly sunny garden. This research led them to Lynn Lowrey and an invitation to a trip to Mexico which opened the door to years of collection trips and an entirely new dimension and direction for the Garden, one that ultimately garnered John and the Garden a place in American horticultural history.
There are a couple of key related takeaways in this example. First, though John gave himself some time to mourn the garden he lost, he eventually determined he had to continue, taking advantage of the clean slate provided by the tornado and creating something that grew from his expanding interests at that time. The previous incarnation of his garden owed more to the gardens he would have been familiar with growing up in South Carolina. His curiosity, positivity, and imagination allowed him to create something wholly new and personal.
Secondly, after the tornado, John saw the garden for what it was, not what he wished it was. The acceptance of the reality made it easier for him to consider options. He wasn’t stuck trying to duplicate something that was no longer viable.
These key points are instructive today as we enter into another summer that began with the derecho (a storm type I confess I had never even heard of before May) and record heat index temperatures. We have had ample rain but will that pattern continue? Or will this be the third summer in a row we experience drought conditions along with record high temperatures? Like John and Carl, we will benefit by being realists about how to keep the Garden sustainable in the increasingly volatile state of our climate. There’s little need to debate that volatility at this point, the data is clear. I think we also have a visceral understanding of it through our experience. Here’s the way On Being podcast creator and host, Krista Tippet, began an interview in September with Christiana Figueres, the Costa Rican diplomate credited with making the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement possible.
In the world in which I was born, and maybe you, too, the weather was the stuff of small talk. The seasons of the year were the underlay of planting and harvesting food that nourishes and fuels our bodies, of course. But seasons have also been the very mundane, predictable rhythm of our days and our lives. Now, the loss of seasons as we knew them, the loss of storms as we knew to navigate them, is an experience we are all sharing in all the places we inhabit and love. This is closer to home than every fight we have about climate and the science around it, the meaning of it. We feel this in our bodies, the young among us most keenly. It leads some of us to those fights and some of us to retreat within, overwhelmed.
Indeed, we each respond to this challenge in different ways – some by denying it exists, some by possibly overstating its impact, and perhaps the majority of us by feeling overwhelmed and paralyzed into inaction. I often feel the latter, but I also live in a garden that is an exemplar of action and resiliency, and it is impossible not to be swayed by its existence. In that same Kristi Tippet interview, Figueres talked about scientific research that's proving the power of positive thinking to guide positive outcomes. She emphasized that at a time when we have the technology, money, and resources at hand to significantly address the challenges of climate change, a positive mindset is critical to the success of our efforts to do so.
In a big picture perspective, I suspect it would be wise to view the climate not as a punishing foe, but as a collaborator instructing us (if somewhat sternly) on the appropriate direction of the Garden. I think if we can take inspiration from John and remain open to its cues, with creativity and some fearlessness we can shepherd our Garden to remain a beautiful, inspiring, and sustainable refuge, even if we don’t know exactly what that looks like at the beginning of the summer of 2024.
Warm regards,
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