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Via Heronswood Voice)
Posted by admin to Original Posts on 2008-01-22, 12:08:14
I’m fascinated by the stand that the Executive Director of the non-profit Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies, also known as The Mary Flagler Cary Arboretum and Botanical Garden, is taking in the controversy over Gifford Garden. I’m also wondering why the CIES’s trustees are concluding that its wonderful garden should be torn out and replaced by an entrance area to the institute’s hiking trails, its greenhouses torn down and fundraising plant sales and horticultural events discontinued. Normally, public trustees are preservationist and married to the status quo. However, this situation seems anything but normal.
First, CIES is a public trust, a non-profit foundation with a “public” that includes about 15 million people within a hundred miles. Second, their published mission clearly states, “The Gifford Garden is an integral part of the Institute’s education mission “. Third, the garden has intrinsic merit, including a surprisingly large plant collection, and should be preserved. There is a natural as well as conceptual tie that binds gardening and environmental stewardship. The Gifford Garden literally brings it to life. It is shocking that a tax-exempt, ecology-oriented institute would announce its intention to destroy a public garden.
Fourth, the annual budget to support Gifford Garden runs about $100,000, a pittance for CIES. Fifth, it has been in existence and supported by a dedicated staff and community of visitors for decades, including a popular annual plant sale. Sixth, there’s horticultural history at Gifford Garden. It used to be part of the New York Botanical Garden. Many renowned horticulturists taught there, as part of the NYBG’s education program. Why not work out an arrangement with a local, regional or national garden society? Hold a few Open Days, raise some funds? It wouldn’t be unfamiliar to these folks. The surrounding area is extraordinarily prosperous. Again, the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies is a public institution. There are moral and ethical issues involved, unlike those facing a private company such as Heronswood Nursery. The CIES serves the public, tax-free. The same laws require Heronswood to serve its shareholders. As the saying goes, the difference is the history of the world.
Oddly, there has been almost no public outcry. Retired New York Times columnist, Joan Lee Faust—one of the best garden writers of any generation—wrote an eloquent protest letter to the Millbrook Roundtable, a local newspaper. The Hudson Valley garden industry leader, Mark Adams, spoke out. A regional group including a few garden writers have made some noise. The blog, Garden Large, written by horticulturist and garden designer Duncan Blaine, is the headquarters for the effort.
Imagine that an environmental research and education non-profit owns and operates a gorgeous public garden and tropical plant greenhouse containing thousands of cultivars and species at its headquarters. One day it decides these assets do not fit its new vision of teaching the public about ecology, and announces that it is going to not merely close, but also destroy them. Imagine that this is occurring 100 miles from New York City—an urban area lacking in public gardens. Furthermore, imagine that there is a “blogosphere” full of pundits who react belligerently to changes involving not local public gardens, but private nurseries located, in some cases, thousands of miles away, and which many of them have never even visited. Poetic, isn’t it?
To their great fortune, CIES has avoided biblical floods of hate mail. I hope the trustees also avoid being dragged through the internet sewer, God protect them. Nonetheless, the major newspapers and garden magazines—particularly those based in the Northeast—as well as serious, fact-based garden websites and blogs, should look into the Gifford Garden situation, and not leave the Millbrook Roundtable, Ms. Faust, Mr. Adams and the sympathetic Duncan Brine of Garden Large to carry all the weight.
By contrast, and by way of an update, Heronswood Nursery continues to preserve its original display gardens in Kingston, Washington—about 1 ½ hours from Seattle and its 1 ½ million people—by talking with The Garden Conservancy as well as the Pacific Northwest Horticultural Conservancy, which are both public non-profits. As we promised, we’re taking the time and care to pass along the unique display gardens to a successor capable of not only maintaining their integrity, but also making them accessible to the public. But, who knows? A “happy ending” may be the sale of the legendary Kingston estate to an enlightened private individual who will nurture its many thousands of rare and exotic plants, shrubs and trees, as the founders did for 12 years before they sold it in 2000, and as we have done since. Public trusts are only as good as the trustees and the public. The demise of Gifford Garden is a variation of our story, but with the crucial differences that it is already a garden entrusted to the public, and apparently of little importance to the horticulture elite. What a bummer for the public.
The fate of Gifford Garden will take a timely measure of how much or how little our society values its gardens. I could write a book about the astonishing conversations I’ve had with members of the garden preservation movement. Everyone has been kind and offered suggestions. Yet, woven through many of these talks have been stories of gardens that have been determined ultimately to have no value, or even a liability, something like a negative value. Now, I can understand a toxic waste dump. However, I cannot grasp that an established garden lowers the value of a home or estate, unless it is viewed not as a garden, but as a mess of trees, shrubs and plants to be removed, like rubbish or a condemned building. I do not believe there’s a public or private garden of merit that falls into such a category, especially in these “green” times. In this particular case, Gifford Garden possesses a greater diversity of taxa on its 2/3 acre than Heronswood does on its 15, and also includes a conservatory greenhouse brimming with tropical specimens which Heronswood never possessed.
Last year, a local developer here in Warrington, PA, had to plan his enormous new shopping center around a tiny creek less than 50 feet long running through the main parking area. The logic of the traffic patterns is non-existent, and the result has been several remarkable months of visitor confusion. But most folks are patient, and they’ll probably get used to it. Yet, there is nothing disorienting or chaotic about a garden placed anywhere. On the contrary, gardens create order, meaning and feeling in public spaces, even on rooftops, as has been recently and widely reported.
On the residential front, trees, foundation plants and formal garden areas should be as precious to a home as a tiny wetland is to a shopping center. Julie Moir Messervy and Sara Susanka explore this subject to great effect in their recent book, Outside The Not So Big House, in which they reverse the scale and value of house and garden, or at least put them on equal footing. We hope the real estate community will soon value the peace and sanity gardens provide in the same way it does the comfort and security of houses.
Meanwhile, please contact the non-profit Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies and urge them to reconsider their decision to void Gifford Garden. In Joan Lee Faust’s words, “For the modest savings the garden’s destruction would provide, don’t the powers that be realize there are some facets to our humanity that should be nurtured?”
