| PASTORAL 11 |
| Feature 1 Windsor PATH OF LIFE GARDEN “It is interesting how many people spend so much time thinking and talking about the phases of life, but it is fascinating to walk the path of life.”—Terry McDonnell Since his childhood, Terry McDonnell has been fascinated by the pivotal stages of life and the metaphors they hold for us. In 1997, he started a large-scale landscape project to reflect his personal interest in the symbolic intersections one might face during a lifetime and to offer possibilities for reflecting on life’s major thresholds. On a beautiful stretch of land along the Connecticut River, he transformed a field and designed and built a fourteen-acre garden that he named the Path of Life Garden. The garden is McDonnell’s ongoing lifetime project. Years earlier, McDonnell had visited an unusual garden in Ireland that is very tightly laid out on less than two acres of land, with paths composed of plants, trees, rocks, and sculptural objects that had been moved from Japan. The Japanese-style garden is over 100 years old and takes visitors through an allegorical journey along the path of life. McDonnell had seen all sorts of gardens over many years, but this one was unlike most gardens—for him, it was full of meaning: “I don’t know what it did to me when I first walked through it, but I knew I had never seen anything else like it.” As soon as McDonnell experienced a walk through the garden, he was inspired and knew what he wanted to do. As part owner of a large tract of land in Windsor that is headquarters to the Harpoon Brewery and Simon Pearce glass company, McDonnell had land to work with, and rather than construct a building, he decided to create a garden and open it to those who wish to see and experience it. For the last twelve years, he has built, maintained, and rebuilt a series of large outdoor “rooms” that reflect the major phases or themes of life: birth, adventure, learning, wisdom, hope, creativity, union, family, community, solitude, ambition, sorrow, forgiveness, joy, respite, contemplation, death, and rebirth. His extensive garden is a profound and practical way to experience what many people spend so much time thinking about: childhood, marriage, family, happiness, sadness, or death. Concepts that are often difficult to articulate or confront are revealed through the sensory experience of exploring McDonnell’s innovative garden rooms, which are simply composed of natural elements, such as grass, plants, wood, and stone. Terry McDonnell’s background is diverse. He set out to be a farmer. As a student, he studied agriculture and wrote his thesis on large-scale sheep farming in New England. He then worked firsthand on various kinds of farms. He sold hay to horse-racing tracks around New York City. He built a hydropower site in New Jersey and, twenty-five years later, still owns it. And he went to business school and lived for a time in California before moving back to Vermont, where he remarried, started a family, switched careers, and now, in addition to tending his garden, is a child therapist. McDonnell knew the major gesture of the garden’s design had to start at the opening of the field, near its highest point, and wind down to the far end of it, low and close to the river. He wanted the experience to include a circular rather than a linear path and contain about twenty outdoor rooms: symbolically, the rooms at the far end of the garden should represent someone in their mid twenties or thirties. To begin planning the overall path of the garden, McDonnell enlisted the expertise of Vermont garden designer Shepard Butler, who first planned a huge amphitheater to utilize the natural curve and slope of the hillside setting and planted a long row of oaks along the southwestern side of the garden site. McDonnell did not define the rooms ahead of time, nor did he draw them out on paper. Instead, he planned them as he spent time on the site and worked the land. Rather than create the rooms sequentially, he responded to the site itself and his ideas at the time in the process of transforming it. Some concepts came to him quickly; he knew immediately, for example, that he wanted to create a large maze of hemlocks to represent adolescence and adventure. Over time, McDonnell’s ideas about the garden and the rooms it represents have continued to evolve; he allowed himself to be open about the design process, and his sources of inspiration are varied. Early on, Birth, the first room in the garden, was simply a single stone standing in the grass. He then took the idea of the garden to senior landscape-architecture students at Vermont Technical College, where each student took a theme or garden room and developed a design project based on it. McDonnell recalls “how incredibly exciting it was for me to hear the students’ perspectives and see their designs. Birth, as it is now, with a surrounding circle of larger stones, was one of the ideas that a group of students composed.” Ambition, a large earthen mound in the middle of the garden, was partially influenced by the big red bridge that visitors can crawl up and over in the Japanese Tea Garden in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. Rather than construct an architectural edifice, McDonnell moved tons of earth to create a similar, albeit more significant, challenge to the visitor. Although there is some religious iconography, such as a wooden cross and a stone Buddha, the Path of Life Garden has no specific religious or spiritual perspective. The garden’s icons are not meant to symbolize particular faiths but instead are used to reference ideas about places. The idea for Rebirth came to McDonnell from a magazine picture he had seen of an old cemetery in Sweden that was surrounded by a simple wooden fence, within which dozens of birch trees had sprouted and grown thick. In McDonnell’s interpretation, the cross in his garden room signifies a burying place, not Christianity; new green growth in an iconographic resting place for the dead becomes rich in symbolism. McDonnell had also visited Nepal, where high in the Himalayas he had seen Buddhist prayer flags and prayer wheels, representing the spiritual notion that the wind takes prayers and sends them out to the world. For Hope, he made his own version of prayer wheels and had children paint them as they wished, in vivid colors that stand out boldly against the bright green grass of the garden. And McDonnell asked Vermont artist Ria Blass to create something similar to the ancient, monolithic sculpted heads of deified moai on Easter Island in the Pacific. Blass’s heavy sculpted figures—each made from an enormous Vermont pine tree cut and carved with saws, then rolled in fire and scorched to provide a permanent, weatherproof skin—are arranged in a large circle to create Community. Not all garden rooms are inspired by other sources; natural materials inspire many rooms. In Family, McDonnell arranged five huge flat stones, each ten to eighteen feet long, in a low circle to create benches that groups of people can sit upon to face one another. For McDonnell, an old millstone represents Union: “It is easier to see the stone than the hole in the stone.” But in his mind, the hole in the middle of the large circular stone is a conduit that symbolically connects the individuals on either side of it; they become one. Visitors of all ages walk in the garden, and many have shared with its maker their love, understanding, and appreciation of it. But the garden is also a creation that holds personal meaning. McDonnell always thinks about his own family when planting trees or arranging stones in it. The stones and trees are often intentionally set in groups of nine (McDonnell grew up in a family of nine children) or eleven (to include his parents). Whenever he could, he made his symbolic numbers, nine and eleven, work. The personal meaning each room holds for Terry McDonnell easily translates into universal meaning. Natural elements, so often taken for granted, are simply arranged and potently perceived. Such elements in the garden are what make the concepts and themes of the rooms so accessible because, unlike a sculpture park full of large-scale steel or bronze works made by artists, the Path of Life Garden is composed of fundamental elements between the earth underfoot and the clouds overhead. It is McDonnell’s combination of these elements, his design of the spaces, and the overall experience of walking the path that opens up possibilities for interpretation and, ultimately, understanding. In their own way and time, visitors can respond to nature and the elements they encounter. They are connected to natural elements by sitting on stone benches, walking on paths cut through field grasses, climbing over a mound of earth, or looking at the sky through a circle of forty-foot-high bamboo poles. Visitors to this garden in Windsor participate in it to have an experience that creates greater meaning. Interpretation is part of the reward. McDonnell has chosen to indicate the themes of the path of life with simple wooden signs on which the names of the garden rooms are handsomely painted. “Some people need help and direction, and some do not,” he says. Not wanting to provide too much information, he allows interpretation: “Anyone who walks through the garden can come up with their own ideas and take as much or as little as they wish from it.” For some, the garden experience fosters change, as with the couple who came to the garden on their fortieth wedding anniversary and discovered that they hadn’t really talked to one another in seven years. Or the woman who shared the tragic story of the death of her infant and after visiting the garden could begin to embrace the complex notions of life and death. McDonnell appreciates and encourages comments, so he keeps a guest book at the gateway of the garden where visitors can write of their experience to share it with others. Not all visitors understand the garden or its maker’s attempt to draw connections through its design and arrangement of elements that, in combination with words, create symbols and pose profound inquiries. Many agree, however, that the garden is peaceful and restorative—as well as simply a nice place to take a walk. McDonnell wants visitors to enjoy it in their own ways, but he also wants to help people learn something from their experience, like acceptance: “Accepting—at any age, under any circumstance—is a great gift.” Allowing oneself to open up one’s mind and feelings to interpret allegories is part of the challenge and success of the Path of Life Garden. For some, thinking allegorically about what they see before them, such as the Connecticut River that flows alongside the garden, can be a challenge. Some visitors are able to think about the river as an idea. They may consider the power and energy that come from it or the thousands of years that have passed by the very spot on which they stand, symbolized by the moving water. McDonnell suggests, “We can attach meaning to the river or simply watch the water go by and not attach any meaning to it whatsoever. The river can mean a lot and it can mean nothing—but it is so beautiful the way it is.” “The garden is almost done.” Or is it just beginning? The changing seasons and years invariably change the experience of visiting it. It constantly changes because nature is evolving: trees grow, wood rots, grass is cut, plants die back and then grow again with new life, sometimes displaying flowers and ultimately making new seeds. McDonnell wants to create a few more rooms, such as Acceptance, Disappointment, or Depression. “The scale is presently heavy toward positive themes like Joy and Hope. It needs to be balanced by other themes in life. Patience would be a good room to do.” In choosing to walk the Path of Life Garden in order to interpret life’s many themes and passages, or simply to take a walk through it to enjoy a nice sunny day, it is easy to be inspired by the experience Terry McDonnell has created. And it is satisfying to consider how the simplest elements in nature and the considered arrangement of them can inspire creativity and so much more. —Glenn Suokko, 2010 Feature 2 Inspired by the impressions left with me by walking the Path of Life Garden, I set a goal to collapse the idea of a lifetime into one year. Over the span of twelve months, with the help of my family, we created a journal of some of the moments that are demarcations of time within each season. The landscape directly outside our doors became our garden of rooms, and we put in words and pictures the highlights that, as simple and noneventful as they may seem, hold personal meaning for us. Rather than allow the traditional national or religious signposts—New Year’s Day, Memorial Day, Thanksgiving, Christmas—to provide our framework, we instead welcome the subtleties and almost imperceptible nuances in the natural world to provide the foundation for celebrating important passages. We learned that measuring a unit of time could become expansive. Contained in a moment—a day, week, month, or year—is the sight, smell, sound, or memory of what was, or the anticipation of what is to come. If nature is a metaphor; her elements, symbols; twelve months, a life; we realized that much could be found and cherished without our venturing too far. At its simplest, this diary becomes an ode to living in Vermont. Our year always starts in spring, with the unfolding of the first bright-green leaves. —Glenn Suokko, 2010 |