Poet Seminarian Finds Spirituality, Inspiration in Nature
Spencer Reece is one of three poets who will read classic favorites as well as their own work during A Season in Poetry, at the Garden on November 20, co-sponsored by the Poetry Society of America. Photo by Ruth Salvatore
I have never been to The New York Botanical Garden; I look forward to being there Saturday for A Season in Poetry. Nature inspires me. I find God in nature. If you think about it, much of the revelations in the Bible all happen outdoors, in nature—Moses coming down from Mount Sinai, Paul falling off his horse on the road to Damascus—very little happens indoors. The outdoors with its plants is rather churchy in its own right.
For the program, I will read the work of others poets of my choosing. I’ll also read one or two of my own poems from among those I’m working on for my second book, “The Upper Room,” which is due out with Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 2014. The title refers to my room at the seminary in New Haven where I have lived in the process of Holy Orders for the Episcopal church. There is a small flower bed I can see out my window; it contains purple cornflowers.
Five seminarians live in the house, along with the Dean of the Divinity School, his wife, their child, and their Burmese Mountain Dog. One of our tasks as seminarians is to prepare a meal for the community once a week. It is a dinner for 100 to 150 people. Part of that duty requires cutting some of the cornflowers for the dinner parties. The cornflower is a delicate, easily broken flower, the petals shedding as rapidly as you pick them; something about their fragility speaks to me. The cornflowers look forlorn in their vase surrounded by all the food and people.
November 20th promises the reverse: three poets placed in a crowd of plants.
Chrysanthemums. You see them everywhere this time of year; their cheery little faces in a rainbow of hues (all except blue!) brightening up front stoops, fire escapes, tree guards, and otherwise bedraggled gardens all over the city. But trust us, you’ve never seen chrysanthemums like this!
On display now for a limited time–just until Sunday, November 21–at the Bourke-Sullivan display house is a wonderland of Japanese chrysanthemums. These mums are far more than the plastic pots you can jump in your car and buy at your local gardening center. These mums are coddled and cultivated and trained and coaxed into a kaleidoscopic array of shapes–dizzying spirals, sprawling umbrellas, cascading waves–each form composed entirely of just one plant. That’s right. One plant.
There are many ways to get to the top: you can work long hours, ignore your family, sacrifice, lose sleep, and take classes. But few classes can guarantee as swift a path to the top as the Garden’s Recreational Tree Climbing Workshop. In this amazing class, along with the popular elective Chainsaws – Safety and Maintenance, students learn valuable skills all while getting the best view of the Garden possible.
The Tree Climbing Workshop returns to the Garden this Saturday and Sunday. The Chainsaw class will be offered Saturday, November 13. The classes will be taught by instructor David Fedczuk.
In the meantime, check out this interview with tree climbing expert and longtime instructor of the Garden’s tree climbing courses, A. Wayne Cahilly, manager of The New York Botanical Garden’s Lionel Goldfrank III Institutional Mapping Department. To see a tree climbing student in action, check out this video from Travel + Leisure where portions of this interview were originally published.
Scott Cully, Sara Mussen & Michael Anthony Natiello contemplate pumpkins and Newton
Gravity, it seems, will always win. Whether it’s in the war against wrinkles, when you drop your buttered toast, or when you’re carving the world’s heaviest pumpkin. Here on earth, we’re all a slave to it.
Rustin Dwyer is Visual Media Production Specialist at The New York Botanical Garden.
Scott Cully has held the Guinness World Record for largest jack-o’-lantern multiple times. In fact, there have been ten record breaking pumpkins in the last 11 years. Eight of those record-breakers were turned into jack-o-lanters, five of which were carved by Scott! Not a bad career, huh?
His last record was set on Sunday, October 31, 2005 and here we are –exactly five-years later– where he will try to break his own record by carving the current World Record-holding pumpkin, a 1,810.5-pound behemoth grown by Chris Stevens of New Richmond, Wisconsin.
He won’t be alone, though — botanical artists Michael Anthony Natiello (the artist behind the 500 carved pumpkins currently decorating the Everett Children’s Adventure Garden) and Sara Mussen are on had this weekend to decorate the two other prize winning giant pumpkins on display next to the record holder. Here’s a short video with Scott talking about the process (hint, wine is involved).
Yep, that’s right ladies and gents. The giant pumpkins are so big, a man can fit inside. Matthew DeBacco from team-pumpkin.org climbed inside Steve Connolly’s 1,674.5 pounder this morning to harvest some seeds. He reported that it was nice and warm, and that if it were on the Lower East Side it would rent for about $1,500 a month!.
What will the pumpkin end up looking like, and will Cully break his own World Record? Only time will tell. But we do love daydreaming here at the Garden. So to get your imagination going about what the great pumpkin might end up looking like, we thought we’d share a few pictures of Cully’s past creations.
Learn more about the giant pumpkins here, here, and here. And to plan your visit for this fascinating Garden experience, click here.
