How It Started
These are photos of the chalkboards that held the expressions of a morning’s ponderings about how to get at the business – the joyful business, not grim, to be sure – of expressing Polly’s spirit and soul in the physical plane that she no longer inhabited. It was a lively morning and I’ll be forever indebted to the twenty-some people who accepted my invitation to be co-conspirators in summoning Polly’s Sensory Garden out of a patch of undeveloped forest / nature at the Van Landingham Glen section of the Botanical Gardens. After a trip into the Glen, we gathered at the McMillan Greenhouse, this crew of educators, landscapers, garden professionals, artists and fans of Polly who shared the passion of trying to create a space that celebrated her, of her ethos of deep care and commitment to basic human kindness, and the multiplicity of elements that that express her – and which express all of humankind.
You see on the chalkboards the excellent work of the Garden staff in transcribing all the ideas and notions that took wing that morning and shaping them into something cohesive and coherent, something that could – and did ! – literally take root in the land itself. It’s a marvel to look back and see what a half-day’s delightful deliberations produced just that morning; to see:
Art Piece – not harsh sounding, rustling / “rain stick” / musical
Rustic vs. formal – whimsical & sarcastic / intentional but free-spirited
Variety of textures (underfoot also moss vs. pebbles) – scent/sound/plant characteristics
Views (sense of sight) – viewing up and down also
User groups – one “senses’ /knows one is included
Garden as node or line, and infinite path (thanks Michelle!!), unbalanced symmetry, undulating topography, not mirror Paula’s Garden
It is an even better marvel to go out to her garden and see all that we dreamed alive and thriving in the wooded glen of the Botanical Garden, manifesting itself variously across the span of a day, a season and a year. When you do visit, you’ll also see Paula’s Garden, reference above coming to life adjacent to Polly’s Garden, which I’ll have more to say soon enough here.
Until then, I thought you might be interested in what the Polly archives recently produced – her own thoughts on the importance of space design, for a classroom she might have sparked to life. That would have been a place of marvel all to itself – and you can see that over on the “Polly” part of the site. Just click on her name above – or on the picture of the lovely young woman sitting on the bridge.
