signs of winter

The Eloise Butler Wildflower Garden, the beautiful enclosed garden where the boys and I have spent several mornings or afternoons, is now pretty much closed for the season. There is one last weekend day that it should be open, and I think we’ll go, but after that, just like every year, the garden will be left to the native flora and fauna until spring, as sure a sign of winter's coming as anything. The 15-acre garden and bird sanctuary, the oldest in the nation, is a bit of a lovely secret. It is surrounded by a high fence and a lockable gate on either end, tucked away in an also beautiful park that has clear views of downtown, but looks like it could be far from any city. J and I were married in that park, in a wooded glade under a giant burr oak. We had our reception at the top of the hill behind it, in a building built in the 1920’s by the Works Progress Administration.

I think it would be fair to say that the location represented the fact that J and I can find God anywhere, but perhaps most easily through witnessing the vast abundance of creation. A church building can’t contain that in the same meaningful way for either of us, though the group of people assembled that day certainly represented what we knew then as our family, related or not. Coming back to the place we were married is a joy – alone or together, and we’ve done it often since that June day seven years ago. Now we’re usually accompanied by two little boys who don’t yet understand the significance of that place for us, but seem impressed by its beauty all the same.

The garden is just behind that glade, up a hill and on the other side of a marsh inhabited by bullfrogs and wood ducks. I think people go to the garden in hopes of seeing a riot of many kinds of flowers – all that abundance in its glory, like you see in the wildflower calendars. In fact, that isn’t really what you find there—Minnesota not being Switzerland,exactly, or even Montana. There are wooded areas, a small marsh, hills and meadows. There are many flowers, rare and common, buzzing with insects. There is a spectacular view at the very top of the highest hill. But what’s really spectacular about this garden isn’t the grand canvass of trees and flowers, but the details. The wild ginger, the mushrooms on rotting logs, the insects that you know must belong to some native plant, but that you’ve never seen before. My boys start to giggle every time they go through the gate, because the path is so springy from the thick layer of wood chips, spread carefully by volunteers to keep us on the path and prevent damage to the garden. The garden is a reminder to me to look – to let down the defenses we city dwellers need to survive the constant assault on our senses. The first thing I usually notice is the wonderful smell of decaying leaves. As I walk, I notice birdsongs, the texture of bark, lichen, and rusty tannin pooled in the marsh, the tiny detailed flowers that would never show up in a landscape photograph.

None of that takes any explaining to my boys – they don’t know how not to see and listen and observe, at least for now.

I love to think about the garden in winter. It must be beautiful covered in snow, its paths unmarred by heavy human footsteps, the birds and other animals growing a little bolder every week as we leave them be for awhile. It must be quite a shock to them when the gates open up again in the spring. When those gates open, we’ll come again, delighted to see the shoots of green promise under the trees and all over the meadow, careful of the birds as they worry over their young, and happy to stretch our legs and amble a bit after a long Minnesota winter. Meanwhile, I’m very grateful to visionaries like Eloise Butler and Theodore Wirth —people who made efforts and choices on behalf of what might happen even after their lifetimes. When my boys are a little older, I hope to teach them about that too, because that was another reason J and I chose this particular park for our wedding. It represented what could happen if a group of people sacrificed and made an effort on behalf of something for a greater purpose than only our perceived immediate needs, having a longer vision than that of our own lifetime. That is, after all, what we do when we set out to build a family.

Isaiah 55:12

You will go out in joy and be led forth in peace; the mountains and hills will burst into song before you, and all the trees of the field will clap their hands.