FROM THE BORDER / AUGUST 2010

"WHAT WE'RE HUNGRY FOR"
by Hilary Gordon
Photos by Blair Randall, 2010

One fine morning, I was pruning and shaping the flowering shrubs at the GFE, when someone walked by and said, “Why don’t you pull all this out and grow food?"

It’s a legitimate question.

Why do I care about flowering plants? If I were a bee or a hummingbird, I’d have a practical answer. These would be my food plants. And as an organic gardener, I can give a practical answer, too. The flowering borders around the GFE stabilize soil, build the water table, add organic matter to our soil, attract pollinators, and beneficial insects. The list goes on.

But as a human being in an urban world, I have an impractical answer, too. People love beautiful gardens. Gardens nourish the eyes with beauty, but even more, gardens nourish the soul.

From at-risk youth to elders in wheelchairs, people enter the garden with their eyes wide and wander slowly as if in a trance. They touch, they smell, and they stare. Relaxed and transformed, they stop one of us and say, “It’s so beautiful!”

The abundant, mysterious, graceful, spacious beauties of a good garden call out to something in us that is very hungry. Our urban hearts are starving for the connection and inspiration living green spaces provide.

Gardens are a temple, a gym, a therapist’s office all rolled into one, to inspire and heal people from the inside out. We are built for gardens, and gardens are built for us.

Hilary Gordon is Sustainable Landscape Education Manager at the GFE.  A life-long gardener, trained at the City College Horticulture program, she has worked as a professional landscape gardener from 1984 until the present.  

Have a question for Hilary? Meet her in the garden Wednesdays 10-2 and Saturdays 10-4.