Gardens, Friends And Lovers Poem by gershon hepner

Gardens should not be
unchanged, but modified,
reducing the ennui
from old growth that has died
Replacing old, the new
growth in a flower bed
consoles for the adieu
of flowers that are dead.
The same applies to friends,
and lovers must be changed
as soon as loving ends
and lovers are estranged.
Replacing old in beds
where once the new had lain
eliminates deadheads
that ought not to remain.

Edward Rothstein writes about changes in the New York Botanical Garden “The Forest Premeditated: Illusions of Wildness in a Botanical Garden, ” NYT, June 16,2008) :
Before Sunday it was possible to enter the conservatory at the New York Botanical Garden, look out a window resembling the one Charles Darwin once gazed from at Down House in Kent, England, and see a lush overgrowth of petals and leaves, exuberant in its variety and density. Now that view is gone (unless, presumably, you travel to Kent) . The Botanical Garden has dispersed the plantings, along with the stagecraft of labels and frames, and replaced David Kohn’s smartly mounted exhibition, “Darwin’s Garden, ” with another temporary horticultural display. That is as it should be. Gardens never remain unchanged. We are so used to thinking of a garden as a refuge, a resting place apart from the world, an earthly echo of a timeless Eden, that we forget that that is the one thing it can never be. Spend some time at the New York Botanical Garden and the entire idea of a garden, let alone a “botanical garden, ” starts to become even more strange. Is the garden a small part of nature, a set of organisms and plants replicating in miniature the vitality of their larger host? Yes, sure, but it is we, not nature, who create the garden, who give it its character within its man-made borders, and then labor to order it according to rules we establish. A garden is as much about the human world as the natural one.


6/16/08