Summertime Story #10
First small but semi-interesting personal detail: I was born and took my first steps between the failed US-backed Bay of Pigs invasion and the resulting Cuban missile crisis. If you might recall that was the crisis that brought two superpowers to brink of nuclear war, led schools to teach “duck and cover,” and inspired Americans the land over to build backyard bomb shelters.
Second small but more interesting detail: my birthplace was Lexington, Virginia, and the general practice doctor who welcomed me to the world that most unusual time was Dr. Robert S. Munger, creator of Boxerwood.
Third little detail: I was my parents’ first child and not so big, and arrived the day before Independence Day not because it was my mother’s time, but because it was Dr. Munger’s. Technically, he probably wasn’t planting trees in July, but he would have been fussing and tending. Why have your gardening holiday interrupted by yet another laboring Lexingtonian? Best to induce and get on with it. At least that’s what I surmise.
Now that I work at Boxerwood, I sometimes wander the garden wondering which tree Dr. Munger actually tended after that delivery. This flowering magnolia? That corky sweet gum? In any case, whether or not your own new little body drew its first breath in the hands of this man, you too can find your birth tree at Boxerwood. At least if you are over thirty. It’s a bit tricky, but if you meander and look closely, you’ll find trees tagged with their own starter IDs: Acer palmatum ’83, Cedrus atlantica ’57, Taxodium distichum ’72.
One of my tree-twins is Prunus pendula, the Japanese weeping cherry located next to the entrance of the Play Trail. Season after season I pass this sentinel on the way to work. By its own delicate, resolute, teary, beautiful, fleeting, broken, and resplendent nature, it’s a fine reminder if ever there was one of how it also feels to live a human life. Prunus Pendula is now past its prime (note to self: keep exercising), yet late in life it also has a new calling. This is the tree that greets every Boxerwood school bus, welcoming the children of the children of those first postwar children.
Dr. Munger etched each tree’s name and date onto an aluminum tag in his own handwriting. The tags are thus a record not only of the tree, but of the man, in time. The man, in time, I didn’t really know. I was just one of thousands of babies he encountered in the span of his professional duties. Beyond check-ups and immunizations there really isn’t much else to tell, other than how a former baby grew up to one day maintain an office in her doctor’s former bedroom, but that’s a different story.
This story--the one I’m telling now--is that of the man, in time, in the garden.
Who am I to know the workings of another’s mind, but word has it that Dr. Munger planted trees for his own interest and curiosity and pleasure. Yet surely few people plant trees just for the moment. Trees by their nature imply a future. A vision. Maybe this vision is something so real you can almost touch it or maybe it’s just a hunch. Maybe it’s a movement toward something, the way a plant seeks sun. Maybe something simple like humor (the Eye!). Maybe something purposeful, like bird habitat. How ever you think about it, planting is a vote for the future and for efforts and heart toward that future. In any case, my point is this: back in the day when fellow Americans picked up their shovels to dig bunkers, Dr. Munger picked up his shovel to plant trees.
Today, you can find the bounty of that effort as you walk around Boxerwood. In Dr. Munger’s own words, to enter the woodland garden is to step into one of nature’s slowest kinetic sculptures. Some of the original trees are completing their natural life spans now. In fact, just last week safety required us to bid adieu to several old friends. But life goes on. So does the Boxerwood endeavor.
In the spirit of that first practitioner---and later, the BEA founders--we here at Boxerwood keep doing two main things. We welcome children into the world and we plant. We plant paw-paws and bluebells and Diospyros virginiana, and concepts of stewardship of course. But we also keep tending the seeds of kindness and wonder and respect and possibility, qualities all of us need whatever the worlds to come.
As sure as sunshine and rain, we plant and tend because that is what Boxerwood does. What commenced decades ago as one man’s effort has now transformed into a community calling. Same-same, but different. And better.
Meanwhile, we are here. In our own time -- amidst pandemics and social change and wildfires and hurricanes both metaphorical and real -- we too can pick up our shovels and plant. Is there anything more humbling, yet necessary?
So grateful, dear reader, you are part of it all.
