Lessons from the Secret Garden

The Salisbury University Arboreta collection has twice received honorary recognition this year alone, after being voted amongst a number of other college’s fascinating Arboretum collections that rated them on their aesthetics and diversity. Both the websites, “Best collegesreviews.org” and “Bestcollegesonline.org,” recently voted Salisbury University diverse botanical arboreta in the top 50th ranking amongst other university garden collections. It was this same traits of aesthetical beauty and diverse simplicity that attracted me to the garden I spent 12 weeks observing.

Hidden away in a niche next to Holloway Hall, at the center of Salisbury University’s first constructed building lays the presence of an ornamental garden, known as “The Secret Garden”, the name assumable a humorous name, that has  long “stuck”, due to the Garden’s complication of  location . This garden area layout is continuously alternated with the addition and removal of the plant species it contains, accordingly to the season. I consider the garden to be designed aesthetically pleasingly, and well layout, to contain diverse varieties of non-native ornamental species, along with a few native hybridized species of ornamental plants. Many of the gardens plants have been transplanted straight into the few segmented areas of the garden, contain the hard grey (mostly clay) soil used in these grounds of their sustenance. There are many more plants littering this garden, all teachers of the earth in their individual ways. Other flowering plants grow, artistically placed in rusty orange clay pots, whose colors matched the rusty red of the garden’s Magenta red brick ancient walls.

 The garden has two sitting areas for its few resting guests, both of which are located at the gardens south facing corners. The sitting area to the left is a bench placed under a 10 year old crepe myrtle tree.  The other sitting location to the right, I found more favorable, no trees above, but it presented the best visual view of the gardens whole content. Behind, I could sit there hidden behind a vine veranda, hidden along with the invisible critter and very audible singing moths and cricket, listening along to the gardens entertainment watched then searched its every corners.

In addition to an elevated view of the whole garden from my favorite veranda siting, one is blessed with the view of a symbolically standing water fountain, to show the sustenance of the gardens life. The world!  We need water! The sad fact remains in my 12 weeks presently observing the garden, at various hours as the came. I had never once saw this fountains spectacularly perform. On the plus side, it was watered for my most appreciated fellow visitors; the birds and the bees. A new habit, I have picked up from an “older fellow” in his visits, to this same garden. Other than the hourly bustle of the university students to and from classes on the weekdays, the guests of the flower and fauna in this garden were rarely the college student, but instead older locals, whose tales were always delightful insights and brought along new ways of perceiving and learning from the garden.

Mounted on the veranda wall is the statue of “Brotherly Love”, one I was introduced to as the Roldan statue by an elderly lady in her visits to the garden. Hand in hand with her daughter, and the other hand clenching a plastic bag showing recently rooted plants.  She shares her concern about the originals statues misplacement, satisfied with the availability of a listener she also briefs me on the plant in the bag, hell to cultivate, a tobacco plant- also known as Nicotheiana .I am forced to research it aesthetical value. I began my visits to the garden in the late summer months of August. My first august day in the garden , I remember was comparably as hot a day,  as the  mid-summer months of the tropical weather I grew up knowing. On that day, I was struck of the kindness and environmental consciousness a gentleman had displayed emptying a gallon of water  into the fountain standing at center of the garden’s, majorly tiled landscape.

In that precise moment, I was certain I had discovered my natural history location, here amongst Man envisioned nature. Soon after, I began habitually visiting the garden to rest amongst Rose bushes, ferns, grasses, shrubs, and commendable trees surpassing two decades in age, hoping to see what I could see, and others often failed to. With the rotation of the season’s cycle, I observed and noted the transformations of the biodiversity in direct relationship to my observations. These encounters with man and nature, unveiled on the additional research on my findings, notes and observations lesson of inter-discipline knowledge’s specifically pertaining to how the natural world’s relations work, nature including man.  In the semester spent conducting a natural history of this location, I was able to better understand the importance of the relationships between man and nature, through the experiences of a woman in a garden.

            My environmental consciousness, in addition, has been improved with new insight on the Natural world. This, through my conversations the garden’s horticultural staff and in my attempt to befriend, fellow garden lovers in their usually brief but purposeful visits to the secret garden, usually for ornamental collection or recreation in the garden. In addition to learning from the ways people relate to this ornamental garden in particular, I spent my time noting, researching its biodiversity content- assisted with resources and new knowledge gained in a Biology class, that I am currently also enrolled in this semester.

Many of the trees in the Salisbury campus arboreta, have botanic tags, but I was informed by the gardens director, they saw no point in tagging the smaller flowering plants, due to the frequent rotation of these plants, in the way he chooses to manage the garden, I personal had mixed thoughts on if metal tags will add to, more than subtract from the garden’s evidently sub-natural state amidst the brick walls surrounding. This plant taxonomy class provides me benefitting background knowledge and resources of the botany and taxonomy of many of this plant species I encounter in my observations to proceed in correctly identifying. In order to correctly identify bird species, in the time I spent bird watching the flamboyantly colored birds the garden infrequently, but I also used online resources to identify bird species, that I identified from their distinguishing characteristics, such as their feather colors, beaks sizes, wing span, songs and other noticed traits.

As a nature writer of the Secret garden, I hope to share my learnt experience from the reflection, interactions that highlight some valuable unforgettable experiences that occurred in conducting my Natural History. I have the hopes the hopes of promoting all gardens, respectfully, as areas that possess essential values, our human species need for the achievement of an Environmental awareness and Consciousness, an ideal needed for man to better understand what Thoreau calls a “Sense of Place “. This, in as well as the notion of viewing gardens as the bridge of connectivity between the forest and man, as thought by Aldo Leopold in his “ Aesthetic of Gardening”. Apart from the aesthetical appeal possessed by ornamental gardens. A Garden of ornamental content capable of demonstrating the natural benefits and processes of the living world, similar to that of the forest. According to Fleisher, (“Grounding of a Marine Biologist”) there is simply no substitute for actually experiencing nature, to see, to smell and to listen to what the integrated offers to an open mind (2011).

Ornamental gardens are designed to contain plants that have been chosen and arranged in a bedding area, specifically for the aesthetical pleasure, they are able to bring to humans. Research show that ornamental gardens filled with these varieties of exotic plants are only able to support 29% as much biodiversity as another garden of native content (Bringing Nature Home). For this reason these ornamental area are mistaken as unimportant and even dangerous to the promotion of environmental consciousness. I disagree with this conclusion.  One can argue that ornamental gardens in their own manner are capable of playing an important role to educate man, through the promotion of environmental consciousness.

On identifying favorable plant species on my tri-weekly visits, I learnt from these experiences that each plant is capable of holding various beneficial roles, sometimes referred to as “ecological services,” in the eco-systematics of our planet and in this garden of nonnative content, no matter its location or purpose for having been planted. Earlier in the semester, during the warmer end of summer and early autumn months, I was amazed at the large population of pollinators the garden succeeded at attracting, especially the Camellia sasanqua shrub, which was occasionally plagues by honey bees, amongst other species of bees and pollinator ants. Evidently, our planet needs more and not less  plants to  assist stabilize its climate, purify the release of our atmospheric pollutants and provide all of us breathing creatures with oxygen. As in the presence of wilderness, the ornamental gardens possess the ability to entail the survival of organisms for a human community that depends on its flora and fauna, as well as enhancing the mindfulness, spirituality and intellectuality of attentive individuals.

As the seasons transitioned from the summer to the fall, flowers started to wilt and the two ways I began to immerse myself in the garden were through bird watching and using the knowledge learnt from my plant taxonomy class to correctly botanize every plant species that caught my interest during my observations. A successful identification of birds of plant species, I found required my absolute attention, which nature adequately grasped – I was able to connect science and the reality of the Garden.  Both of these rituals I partook in promoted David Orr’s ideologies of Biophillia”; Biophillia meaning the ability to love all aspects of nature. Biphobia on the contrary has to do with hatred and discomfort of a person for the natural world (pp. 131-133).

I learned mistakes were to be made, and most importantly learnt from. Today I am certain of only 4 species of song birds of the many I watched visit the garden over the course of the semester -I did not have or exactly need binoculars being that the garden barely could contain its 3 adult trees. These birds were primarily red and brown. The red birds, I grew infatuated with more quickly; they looked exotic and beautiful, sold by nature to my aesthetical senses. These birds were the tanagers; both scarlet and summer tanagers made infrequent visits to the garden, oftentimes showing up individually as they are known to, suggesting I was observing the same bird of each species on numerous occasion. I first spotted the summer tanager in the warmer months of the fall but surprisingly, once the weather got colder the scarlet tanager replaced the visits of its scarlet cousin. I initially spotted “a red bird” on the crepe myrtle tree, well known as America’s most favorable exotic Ornamental planted in communal areas as décor 

The most favorable hiding location for various creatures coming into the garden was amongst the oak leaf hydrangea, not surprisingly a specie indigenous to America. These shrub bushes belong to the Saxifrage family, and unlike many other Natives shrubs these are capable of growing all through the year, in all seasons and in extreme or drier soil conditions. These shrub bushes in the garden stood 8 feet tall and stretched from the start till the end of the passageway leading into the garden.  At first I was drawn to these bushes, for their sweet scents powerfully linger through the narrow passage area into the garden. Approached soon after are the shrubs blossoming flowers, who again stole my attention as they resembled cone-like bunches of distinctly shaped, flat petal disk flowers with panicle floral arrangements, whose colors changed along with the transitioning of seasons.  At first, they had plush cream petals, which over time darkened pink as the summer season ended and became a rusty red brown matching the theme of fall, they are spectacular sights for the biophillic. In addition to the shrubs spectacular physical qualities, it existed very noticeably, as it was always extremely noisy to be around, with nothing usually in close visibility.

Till the moment, your sight is caught by the swift movements of sharp colored feathers, which sooner or later end up in contrast with the evergreen glossy leaves of the neighboring Camellia sasanqua shrub, occasionally beautifully decorated in white splashed of bird dropping, also matching the pale white petals, of the plant and that which often surrounded. This here is Art.

Surprisingly, I was surprised to find negative news on researching the Hydrangea shrub. Barely any of the plants parts are of nutritious value, as the Oak leaf hydrangeas only edible parts are the seed of it fruits only. Although, not surprisingly these seeds are the favorite snacks of the garden seed eating birds like the tanagers and Golden finches whose beak morphologies to fit the straight. Every other part of this exact shrub including its flower buds, bark and leaves are poisonous to consume. But that should not be viewed as evil, but instead seen to the benefits of the plant’s survival. Fleisher advocates for the ideals of attention, as he believes “It is harder to dispose of anything or act selfishly towards it, that if close enough attention has been paid to it (p.33). It took my time and attentiveness toward the garden as a whole. For example with the oak leaf hydrangea to benefit the knowledge learnt from them. On accessing resources online alone for information of these plant species, I was exposed more easily to incomplete information that focused on the Oak hydrangea negative qualities of poisonous chemical makeup, rather than an appraisal of their aesthetical and ecological benefits.

Exposure to such chaotically blinding information could have risked promoting Biphobia, opposite to my affection for the garden and its contents, because the information used in the bettering of my consciousness only, I had shared non-lethal experience with the hydrangea, in my observations of it and watched multitude other creatures from the birds, bees and the unseen ever-singing critter in their successfully attempts to be hidden, shaded by the faux Oak tree look-alike leaves. Biophillia is what I feel towards all areas of the natural world existing in different qualitative natural forms. According to Leopold, there is an important need for our ecological education, we need to be better engaged with the natural world to be a biotic citizen, with the character of a better existence in nature’s presence.

Ade Majekodunmi

  

Work cited

Fleischer Thomas (2011). “The Grounding of a Marine Biologist”. The Way of Natural History: Trinity University Press. Print.

Leopold, Aldo. (1949). “The Land Ethic.” A Sand County Almanac, and Sketches Here and There. New York: Oxford University Press.

Orr, David W (2004). Earth in Mind. Washington: First Island Press.

Tallamy, Douglas W. " Gardening for Life." Bringing Nature Home, by Douglas Tallamy. N.p., n.d. Web. 8 Dec. 2015.