Flowing Ethics in Work and Peace

by John Cannizzo, GreenTeam director, New York Horticultural Society

Has this happened in your gardening? You feel an experience being drawn out longer and longer? Until you quiver like a violin string?

In gardening, past is linked to present by an unbroken chain of flowing events. Subjectively this finds expression in a curious feeling difficult to describe.

When working as an instructor it is important not to confuse two things: solving a problem, and stating a problem correctly. It is only the second that is obligatory for a teacher.

For example, why can’t a person live so as to avoid losses and misfortune? Why have the forests been cut down? Why do people hinder each other in general? On the street is a brown arborvitae, a broken clay pot, a string of cold Christmas lights. Best mix your container "soil" yourself: peat moss, manure, sand, 3 + 2+ 1. Hercules mixes. I carefully untie the juniper. If there is sun better use juniper than arborvitae. It is more forgiving.

Week before Thanksgiving, the year of September 11th, funding for most programs was withdrawn. If not for the inspiration that made us turn toward income generation, the internship program would have been another casualty.

An older woman stops to ask us what we are doing.

“I wish that I could get my gardener to use organic soil amendments. She insists on chemicals.”

At the office is a message from a managing agent inviting us to bid. It’s an East End Avenue contract. This for us is almost undreamed of wealth – security for one year.

James and I submit a proposal. The board of directors requests a presentation. Some are uncomfortable with hiring a program of ex-offenders.

Have you ever had the feeling (though you cannot see them) someone has just silently walked into the room? It was the woman that we had met on the street – chairman of the board. We recognize each other immediately. She insisted that the board hire us regardless of background.

That was our first important commercial contract. It was also our first healing garden. In time I found out that the woman that insisted on hiring us lost a son on September 11. The garden was her therapy.

*All photos courtesy of John Cannizzo

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The Horticultural Society of New York’s internship program, GreenTeam, has made quite a lot of money replacing arborvitae, which require a lot of care until they get established, with juniper, which is much easier to care for. Some buildings treat their curb side plantings almost like annuals and many perfectly good evergreens never get a chance to become established. When we first started our gardening service we were foolish enough to make the mistakes that we needed to make to learn that things that we needed to learn in order to do the things that we needed to do.

The garden, which had some fine foundation plants, suffered from exhausted soil. The chairman of the board who was an avid gardener could not remember compost or manure ever having been added to the soil in all the years she lived there. In our teaching we try to feed two birds with one feeder: to create gardens that paint nature in her true aspects, and to show how far our lives fall from the ideal natural life. I don’t know what this ideal life is just as it is unknown to all of us. We all know what a criminal deed is but who really can say what a life free from all dishonorable deeds would be like?

That year we planted mums. L. was feeling moody. He is timid in the garden. He said, “Some people talk nonsense and cheat but they enjoy life. Now that I am trying to be good in my life I feel uneasy.” He was born in the Jim Crow south. For so many of our students everything, absolutely everything, is seen as a problem with no solution; everything, absolutely everything. L., however, always shares his lunch with everyone. Today his mother packed him 3 turkey sandwiches, 2 cheese sandwiches, 2 pieces of pumpkin pie, a quart of chocolate milk, a box of chocolate chip cookies, an apple, a pear, a bunch of grapes, some potato chips and pretzels, a blueberry yogurt and a bag of m&m’s.