I am an avid gardener. I love all things gardening. I specifically focus on landscape gardening. I love the creative aspects of landscape gardening, thinking about color, composition, and design through site conditions and plant selection. I love how gardening forces you to work with the earth; grounding your focus to the weather, seasons, and what grows and fails over time. I love the parallels, lessons, and analogies gardening offers for life and business; for example, if you fail to weed, pay attention, or care for a garden, I can guarantee the result. A successful garden requires consistent attention to detail, love and affection, and discipline. The same can be said for your life in general. I love the exercise and movement that gardening offers while at the same time beautifying and shaping my environment. The reasons go on and on.
Last year, I took on a larger gardening project, a project I called “Gardening at Scale,” which corresponds with my mother’s passing and the cemetery where she is buried. About ten years ago, our family ran out of burial plots at our ancestral cemetery. We needed more “Rooms” at the “Inn,” as my grandmother would say. So my mother, father, and grandmother searched for a new eternal resting place and found a little independent Jewish cemetery called the Adath Yeshurn Cemetery (AYC) in Edina, MN. They found a lovely location along the meandering Minnehaha Creek and purchased several burial plots there. Everything was fine until last year, when my mother passed.
On the day before her funeral and burial ceremony, I visited the site to make sure everything was in order. And while I had visited the cemetery many times in the past to visit my grandparents, this visit was different – and I didn’t like what I saw. I saw an overgrown forest, filled with invasive buckthorn, that was now blocking the once picturesque creekside views. I saw overgrown trees blocking the sunlight from warming the ground and strengthening the grass. I saw fallen branches from softwood box elder trees strewn about. I saw prickly invasive brambles covering ornamental trees that graced the grounds. I saw a cemetery that was unkept, disorganized, and drab. I saw deferred maintenance issues everywhere I looked. This was to be the eternal resting place for my mother? My beautiful Viking princess mother? No, not on my watch.
A Warrior in The Garden
Let me first state my gardening philosophy: “To be a warrior in a garden rather than a gardener in a war.”
I don’t love gardening because it’s easy. I love gardening because it is difficult. Gardening requires work, diligence, and persistence. Gardening doesn’t permit you to coast. When you coast, invasive weeds naturally attack everything. Order and beauty quickly dissolve into chaos and disorder. Natural law is always at work in the background, waiting for you to let your guard down, waiting for you to coast.
My immediate reaction to the state of the cemetery and the fact that my mother’s burial ceremony was the next day triggered me into action. While my visit to the cemetery that day wasn’t intended to be a workday, my dissatisfaction with the setting for my mother’s funeral meant the balance of that day would involve the hardware store, cutters, mulch, and grit. Sometimes you don’t get to decide when to take on a battle; sometimes the fight shows up, and you have no choice but to go to war.
Over the next five hours, I transformed that landscape, creating a setting befitting the burial ceremony. Other than the cemetery caretaker, no one knew the battle that had taken place. The caretaker was the only person who witnessed the before and after, and I believe he thought I was crazy. My mother’s burial ceremony turned out to be a beautiful event in a serene setting. All those in attendance felt comfortable and in the presence of beauty as we buried my mother.
In the following days, I began to take steps to ensure my mother’s eternal resting place is befitting of a Viking princess. To that end, I began investigating the AYC cemetery’s management and went directly to the largest, most established cemetery in the area to gather information on pricing and availability. I met with AYC board members, explaining my problem and listening to their responses. I learned that others saw what I saw, and change was afoot. The AYC cemetery board was being reconstituted, and management was being replaced. I also learned the AYC cemetery was financially solvent (something many cemeteries struggle with). So I joined the AYC board of directors, and my family members who had already checked in at the “Inn” would stay put, for now. Legacy matters. Caring for your legacy is something we should all do. I am determined to do everything in my power to honor my mother, father, and grandparents.
Gardening at Scale
If you think about a cemetery, it is essentially a large landscape garden. Joining the AYC board offers me a unique opportunity to landscape gardens at a large scale. Shaping your environment to promote and support your life journey is a key message in my book, Healthy Wealthy Longevity. Gardening at scale speaks to shaping a larger environment to create a more beautiful place. Creating beautiful spaces where families remember and celebrate their ancestors and loved ones is an incredible opportunity. It is another opportunity to be a warrior in the garden where I can make a bigger impact, helping others, while testing my skills as a gardener.
Serving on the AYC cemetery board is also an opportunity to learn about the many issues facing independent cemeteries. Cemeteries are to be eternal, which is a long time. How do you create something that lasts forever? Now that is a real challenge.
This article will be one of a series of articles discussing my experience as a Warrior in the Garden and Gardening at Scale. Starting at the AYC cemetery feels somewhat befitting, don’t you think? After all, the entire point of my book Healthy Wealthy Longevity is that we all end up here – dead in a cemetery – so our goal is to experience as much happiness as possible for as long as possible.
The journey is ours to create and craft, but how do we increase the odds of that happening? How do we enjoy the ride in the ’67 Firebird for as long as possible? We all want to increase the odds that we look back at the end of our life and say, “My life has been a dream.”