Reclaiming Simple Garden Pleasures - Sunflowers, Roses, Hollyhocks and more

Krista Tippett, on her radio show blog, 'ON BEING', writes:

 " the transcendent food memory of my childhood remains the enormous, red, delicious tomatoes that were available at a ramshackle store on Main Street for a couple of months each summer. .... Dan Barber.... would have us ask this: Why did we abandon that pleasure, and how can we reclaim it as part of our ordinary food lives? "

I must follow this compelling question with one of my own about transcendent garden memories:

"Why did we abandon the simple pleasures of growing carrots in milk cartons, hollyhocks along old fences or lilacs at the corner of a house and how can we reclaim this as part of our ordinary waking life?"

milk carton gardening

Hollyhocks

Honeysuckle

We all have such memories - even city kids like me...

it might be the 'weed' that smelled like licorice ( anise hyssop), the buttercups that you put under your chin, the honeysuckle that you could suck a teeny drop of 'honey' from, the sweet smell of roses as you walked past a certain house, the bright yellow daffodils in early spring that sprang up overnight it seemed....

Dan Barber of Stone Barns ( a fabulous place near where I live) is on a mission to revive 'good food'...and I  guess I feel similarly about bringing flowers, plants and gardens back into our lives....this kind of knowledge has been cast aside in favor of math and physics but I say children can learn those disciplines better through understanding the phenomenal natural world around them.

So plant those sunflower seeds, install that Elephant Ear and cut up those milk cartons....transcendent garden memories await you.

Rainbow Knock Out Roses

The Glorious Sunflower

In one of my earlier blog posts I wrote about the Native Americans' Three Sisters Garden (corn, beans and squash ) but I neglected to tell you of the Fourth Sister...a very important member of this family!

This is from Hubpages: 

"Fourth Sister, didn't look anything like her other sisters, although she was as tall and as slender as First Sister (corn) . That seemed fair to all, because Third Sister and Second Sister shared similar but different features. They could climb and run, while their other two sisters were forced to stand tall and proud."

Mother Sun explained that each sister had her job and each had to benefit and protect one another and nourish the rest of the family but Fourth Sister's job was most important of all -- for she was the guardian of the North, planted firmly, to protect others from the robbers who soon would come."

The fourth sister was the elegant sunflower.

The Sisters are known to the Native Americans as the “mothers of life”  but they all need each other to survive.  Corn uses the nitrogen supplied by the nitrogen fixing roots of the beans and provides a place for the beans to climb. The squash suppresses weeds and keeps the soil shaded and moist. The prickly leaves of the squash provide a deterrent from four legged raiders of corn.

So what does the Sunflower do?

Taiyo Sunflower (click here)

The sunflowers keep the birds from devouring the corn. How? Well, true sunflowers exhibit the heliotropic habit of following the sun through the day but when they are full of sunflower seeds they stay facing the east. Thus when sunflowers are planted to the north of the garden patch, the birds see the sunflowers first thing in the morning sun and dine on the sunflower seeds rather than the corn kernels....

from Rainy Side Gardens

The FOUR SISTERS celebrate the harmony of nature and bring abundance to farmers and happiness to the well fed home.

By the way, the true giant sunflower is used as an emblem of the philosophy of Spiritualism. They see the sunflower as forever looking to the light and applaud its unique arithmetic: supposedly each sunflower has 12 sets of leaves ( months in a year) , 52 yellow petals (52 weeks in a year) and 365 seeds (365 days in a year). I cannot verify this but that is the story..... I hope it is true.

Here is a wonderful farmer talking about his sunflower field - the birds are very happy here!

 

 

The Serenity Garden of Algonquin Regional High School

All I wanted, when I was a student in New York City public schools, was a school garden. No Luck.

So every time I read about a school creating a garden for their students I jump for joy.  Today I give  kudos to a special school and special parents.

Within the bustle of the Algonquin Regional High School in Northborough, Massachusetts lies a serenity garden....

The Algonquin Serenity Garden, located in the school's  courtyard, was started in 2007 by the Murphy Sisters Foundation. The foundation was formed by the parents of Shauna and Meghan Murphy, sisters who were killed in an auto accident in October 2005.

Shauna was 17 and Meghan was 15. Both were students at Algonquin high..

Michelle and Christopher Murphy, the girls’ parents, and other supporters of the garden wanted a place “to remember those who died too soon,” said Susan M. Halpin, a consumer science teacher at the school.

And so 18,000 square feet was designated as the site for a quiet space to invite contemplation and enjoy Nature.  The serenity garden master plan (created by Alan Steinman Landscaping) calls for trees, a gazebo, a foot bridge, granite benches and a butterfly garden.

And of course, this being a school, the serenity garden also serves as a  living classroom, teaching valuable lassons about a host of things. There are rows of vegetables, compost bins and the math students even marked out the path for a brick walkway.

"We've had real enthusiasm with the students to do this," Halpin said.

Halpin and environmental science teacher Chrissy Connolly took a class in the summer to learn how to incorporate garden lessons into their curriculum.  "We're hoping to get new ideas on how to use this space as a learning tool," Halpin said.

Congratulations to Algonquin High! I hope your Serenity Garden inspires others out there.

What a wonderful way to remember the Murphy sisters.