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The Rev. Dana Prom Smith, S.T.D., Ph.D. (9/11/2013)
As
I tool down the street in front of our house, I pass some lovely gardens as
well as some drearily graveled yards, but the garden with which I would collide
if I didn’t hang a left at a junction is a sheer delight of colors and
shapes. The flower that has intrigued me
the most is a large white peony, partly because I have failed at getting my
peonies to bloom for the last eleven years.
The
garden’s the work of Kristi Baty. I’ve seen
her husband, Ace, a microbiologist who is an associate at W L Gore, doing grunt
work around the yard, but the garden is Kristi’s baby. However, the peony isn’t. It’s her great, great grandmother’s
baby. The peony is peripatetically genealogical,
traveling with familial migrations and generations from Indiana ,
to Wyoming , to Colorado ,
and finally to Flagstaff
The
garden isn’t Kristi’s only baby. Along
with Ace, she’s raising two teenage girls, and with degrees in cultural
anthropology and elementary education she owns and operates Summit Gymnastics
Academy
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But
on to her garden. She calls it a
mishmash, but it’s really a profusion of colorful plants, several of which are
family heirlooms and all of which are perennials. Her method sounds haphazard, but the result
is not. Some gardens are plotted as
though they were geometric exercises, carefully laid out ahead of time on graph
paper and precisely executed; however, others are the products of a vision
perceived by the gardener, the details of which are seldom known at first.
These gardens unfold
as the vision is gradually revealed to the gardener, something like Abraham who
“went out not knowing where he was to go (Heb.11:8).” They require a faith that the vision will
ultimately be revealed, perhaps not all at once, but bit by bit. Faith requires that the visionaries trust
themselves enough to live without the certainty of knowledge. The result is a graceful garden in which all
the lines are curved, leading the eye from one space to the next as though the
garden were a journey with an intriguing something around the next curve.
Some
of the journeys in the garden lead her into her history and heritage. Unlike so many rootless people, Kristi has
kept faith in her garden with her forebearers.
It is difficult to know ourselves if we don’t know from whence and whom
we have come. In short, her garden has a
memory, and as she enjoys her garden, she remembers.
If
Kristi’s garden is a memory filled with ancestors, it’s also a garden filled
with love. She created a bower under
some lilac bushes where their daughters, Ellie and Madigan, could hide and read,
a place for children. Off in the corner
is a rock garden filled with cascading plants.
There is a patio with tables and chairs for warm weather parties and
dinners, but most of all there are the flowers, tulips, daffodils, iris,
gladiola, and dahlia, spread throughout beds scattered here and there in the
garden. Her favorite flowers are
delphinium, daisy, phlox, sweet peas, and clematis.
Save
for the concrete driveway and steps in the front and a small pad off the
sliding glass doors in the back, there isn’t a straight line in the yard. The reason is simple. Straight lines are as dull as dish water and
impotent as well. A skier is all S lines
as is the cocked arm of a boxer or quarter back. Once the skier stands up straight, it’s all
over. When the punch is thrown or the
ball passed, the power is spent. Curved
lines are graceful and powerful.
The
19th century German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, in Beyond Good and Evil writes: “Every
great philosophy has been . . . . the personal confession of its author and a
kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir.”
So it is with gardens. It’s the
gardener’s personal confession and memoir.
And with Kristi, it’s the personal confession and memoir of her joie de vivre.
Copyright © Dana Prom
Smith 2013
Dana Prom Smith and Freddi Steele edit
Gardening Etcetera for the Arizona
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