Garden Club of America
Annual Meeting Keynote Address
May 5, 2003
The Art of Place-Making and Place-Keeping: The Role of the Garden Club of America in Beautification, Conservation, and Education
Good morning! Thank you for the honor of addressing the 90th Annual Meeting of the Garden Club of America.
Never in human history has it been more important to cherish, nurture, and preserve the places we call home, community, and Earth. The biodiversity crisis that is rapidly reducing plant and animal species on our planet, the population crisis in which our own species is pressing ever harder on Earth’s finite resources, the ills and unrest of societies, the conflict of war—these are the very real and frightening perils of the 21st century. Today I want to talk about the necessary work of gardeners and other place-makers and place-keepers in this increasingly mobile, technologically oriented, rapidly globalizing, fractious, and conflicted world.
If there is hope for the future, it is rooted in the garden both as fact and metaphor, for the garden is basic nourishment, the staff of life, and also the symbol of paradise. It is timely to reflect that in both Islamic and Christian cultures, the garden is an emblem of paradise, a place of bounteousness, peace, and salvation. As active gardeners, GCA members are guardians of this fundamental and timeless ideal. Gardens—even very simple ones of the kind we call vernacular—are therefore places of a very high order.
And it is place-making and place-keeping that I wish to celebrate here today. The function of place-making and place-keeping is embodied in GCA’s statement of purpose, which can be summarized in three words: Beautification, Conservation, Education.
Let’s take these in order. First, let me say that “beautification” is not a sissy word. The Central Park Conservancy’s mission statement—to make the park clean, safe, and beautiful—was fundamental during the sixteen years that I was privileged to be a public servant and guide the park’s restoration and renewed management. Those who thought of the word beauty as something a bit effete, as—well, too feminine—kept trying to amend the mission statement. “No,” I said, “It’s not clean safe and green, or clean, safe, and attractive. It’s clean, safe and beautiful.”
Twenty-five years ago Sally Meyer, Elise Deans, and the other members of the New York Chapter of the GCA who volunteered to help restore the Conservatory Garden at 104th Street and Fifth Avenue in East Harlem were certainly not embarrassed by the notion of making Central Park clean, safe, and beautiful. Resurrecting that garden within the park, which another GCA member, Anna Glen Vietor, subsequently beautified with bulbs given in memory of her daughter Barbara, was an important first step toward healing the rest of the park’s battered and beleaguered 840-acres. The GCA further helped the Conservancy continue its commitment to the beautification of Central Park’s north end with a gift of native grasses and wildflowers for the meadow on the slope between the Ravine and the road connecting the East and West Drives.
Now as I look at the long list of GCA community improvements that celebrate the new millennium, I see the word “beautification” attached many important civic projects—everything from planting daffodils to cover an embankment at a busy entrance highway into West Orange, New Jersey, to seeding native plants at Mission San Jose in my native city, San Antonio. Small steps in the face of the world’s troubles, yes. But GCA is responsible for many, many such acts of townscape and historic-site beautification over the past 90 years of its existence. By taking the art of place-making, the gardener’s role, into the public realm, the GCA demonstrates that, as my Texas mother used to say, “Honey, looks count!” And she meant that appearance and character are integral, form and meaning cannot be divorced.
I do believe, along with all of you, that beautiful streets and parks do matter—a lot. Volunteer place-makers like Christine Freitag, your former president, have passed on their grassroots love of place to their daughters, which is why I am proud to salute my friend Amy Freitag, a professional landscape architect and historic preservationist who is the current Deputy Commissioner for Design and Captial Construction in the New York City Department of Parks.
“Conservationist” is another word for the gardener who engages in a positive and faithful relationship with nature over time. For nearly eighty years, since 1924, GCA has had a conservation committee. The conservation committee has fought billboard blight on highways, air and water pollution, and the use of pesticides. It has fought to protect wildlife areas, endangered species, and natural ecosystems. GCA conservationists have saved redwoods, founded nature camps, and established a fellowship in ecological restoration, thus weaving into its mission of conservation the essential and complementary mission of education.
I am particularly happy today to be able to salute my Texas friends and Johnson City neighbors J. David and Margaret Bamberger, owners of the Selah Ranch, who are receiving an award for their work as land stewards. When I first met David, we exchanged business cards, and I was pleased to note that this former CEO, the head of an important commercial food enterprise and now the president of a land trust that promotes the ethic of place-making and place-keeping through demonstration and education, chose the term Land Steward for his professional job title. His 5000-acre ranch in the beautiful Texas Hill Country was an over-grazed, depleted, and degraded landscape when he purchased it in 1969. By clearing invasive vegetation, notably the water-guzzling juniper or cedar as it is called in Texas, and sowing native grasses, the Bambergers have created an idyllic landscape where the deer and the scimitar-horned oryx roam. That’s right: there are no buffalo, but the Bambergers have entered into an agreement with the New York Wildlife Conservation Society and are providing a habitat for scimitar-horned oryx culled from genetically diverse herds so that these animals can continue to populate the wild and the world’s zoos with healthy stock. More important even than this, the Bambergers offer educational workshops, teaching their stewardship practices to others who want to be place-makers and place-keepers as well. By honoring them at your Awards Dinner on Tuesday evening the GCA honors its own commitment to conservation and education.
I would like to salute some of this year’s other GCA medallists as well. Wilson Nolen will receive your Achievement Medal for his leadership over the past several years of a great national institution, the New York Botanical Garden, which has done so much to advance botanical science and foster horticultural skills for more than a century. Another friend, Beth Strauss, will receive your Distinguished Service Medal for her longtime commitment to the creation of gardens for the public’s enjoyment and education and her untiring efforts to provide the funding to secure their future. And what would New York City, the Hudson River Valley, and, indeed, the rest of the country and the world be like without the trans-generational commitment of the Rockefeller Family to land and water conservation, historic preservation, and philanthropy! Recipients of your Margaret Douglas Medal, the Rockefellers have used a great American fortune to enhance the quality of life for millions of Americans and visitors from around the world.
Along with these, I wish to congratulate your other medallists, Nancy Stallworth Thomas, Kathleen Barker, Nancy D’Oench, Eleanor Torry West, and Nancy McLaren, each of whom has made an important lifetime contribution to one or more of the GCA’s mission goals embracing Beautification, Conservation, and Education.
I cannot leave the subject of education without saying something about my own commitment to teaching others about the art of place-making and place-keeping. The Bard Graduate Center, which was founded by the remarkable scholar and philanthropist Susan Weber Soros in 1993, now has a program in Garden History and Landscape Studies of which I am the director. The curriculum of the program grows out of the themes and the histories of places discussed in my recent book Landscape Design: A Cultural and Architectural History as well as out of my experience as a historic landscape preservationist for which I was awarded a GCA Medal in 1992, one of the proudest moments in my career in Central Park. That book is on display here today along with another brand-new book by my longtime friend and colleague, the Central Park photographer and historian Sara Cedar Miller, whose beautiful images you have been looking at here this morning. And I could not help noticing that among the several fellowships that the GCA sponsors as part of its commitment to education there is the Douglas Dockery Thomas Fellowship in Garden History and Design. I would just like to say that we are ready, willing, and able to provide a rich educational experience for the recipient should she or he choose to the Bard Graduate Center.
Beautification, Conservation, Education. Thank you, GCA, for fostering these three pillars of place-making and place-keeping while knowing, as every gardener does that things change, that place is mutable. Nothing in nature or in life remains unaltered. But all human beings nonetheless long for stability and some sense of belonging to a family, a group, a nation. And these things have physical dimensions. Each of us must claim a place in the world. Even as we communicate with the far ends of Earth via satellites or try and comprehend the science that reveals a post-Big Bang expanding universe, we are biological and social creature whose basic instinct is territorial. We still congregate around hearths and settle in communities. The natural fabric of the planet is constantly being altered by the forces of climactic change, seasonal growth and decay, the slow erosion by wind and rain, freeze and thaw, and the imperceptible but relentless movement of the Earth’s crust as mountains and coastlines are formed and reformed through eons of time. Into this dynamic topography we integrate art and technology, building skyscrapers and roads, dams and bridges and cities. The gardener as place-maker is a vital component in this shifting world of nature and equally shifting world of art and technology.
Seen in this light, the word “garden” is less a noun than a verb, less a fact than an act. Our job as gardeners is to promote and demonstrate strategies that coax nature to a fuller realization of its own beauty and to educate those who come after us to do the same. That is what place-making and place-keeping are all about. And that is what GCA is all about. Thank you all for what you do.