Forgiveness garden for Rwanda
|
|
Toolbox
By Susan Smallheer Staff Writer - Published: March 29, 2009
SAXTONS RIVER – Rwanda is about as far as you can get from Saxtons River.
Not just in miles, but also in memories.
The calm of a 19th-century Main Street and the security of trusting your neighbors is a stark contrast to Rwanda, where neighbors slaughtered neighbors in an outbreak of ethnic genocide that overtook the central Africa country in 1994.
Julie Moir Messervy, a landscape designer whose studio is located on Main Street in Saxtons River, hopes to design a "Garden of Forgiveness" for Kigali, Rwanda, to help Rwandans heal from the brutality.
It will be an enormous challenge, says Messervy, who visited Rwanda for the first time last month.
Messervy's trip to Rwanda was for a conference called "A Gathering of Forgiveness." She started an in-depth study of the genocide to understand the emotions and history behind the event.
She worked with five Rwandan young men during the conference, and their ideas about forgiveness and what should be in a garden about Rwanda, she said.
"Their aesthetic preferences were that it be 'simple and clean,' 'a big sky,' and a 'pizza oven,'" she said, laughing.
"People speak a lot in metaphors," she said, referring to the notes she took during the conference. There are two parts to forgiveness, she said, those who ask for forgiveness and those who need to forgive.
Designing such a garden, she said, will depend a lot on the site. But her ideas on a late March morning center on two paths, touching each other, moving away and coming back together. "I don't know what those two different qualities are just yet," she said.
Moving her hands in parallel parabolas, Messervy asked, "How do you implement forgiveness?"
Some experts say 1 million people, Tutsis and moderate Hutus, were killed in the 100-day rampage and many women were raped. Many of the Tutsis were killed in forests and swamps, where they took refuge, she said. They were also murdered in churches, mostly with machetes.
Last summer she was approached by the executive director of the organization Gardens of Forgiveness, the Rev. Lyndon Harris, whose New York City group is building a garden in memory – and forgiveness – for the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 and is working to build similar gardens in other locations around the world.
Harris and Messervy had first met a few months earlier, when he attended one of her lectures in North Carolina, and he told her about his "Gardens of Forgiveness."
His appearance at her annual Saxtons River design workshop at Vermont Academy was a surprise, she said, and he brought five people to listen and learn.
Next month, Messervy will be in New York City for another Rwandan gathering, attended by the Rwandan minister of reconciliation, for more discussions about the garden.
Messervy traveled to Rwanda in February for a seminar about the effort to heal the wounds in that country. She said that while the current Rwandan government has made forgiveness an official policy and goal, forgiveness is not everywhere, and she worries whether the government is just talking, not acting.
"All the survivors say, 'This is only the beginning,'" she said.
Uuu
Messervy is the author of five philosophical garden books including "The Contemplative Garden" and the "The Inward Garden." Her most recent book, published in January, is "Home Outside: Creating the Landscape You Love," a slightly more practical design book. Her next book will be about the seven archetypes of space: sea, cave, harbor, promontory, island, mountain and sky, she said, exploring the theory of human development.
She is also the designer of award-winning gardens: the Toronto Music Garden, which was a close collaboration with renowned cellist Yo-Yo Ma, and is based on a cello suite by J.S. Bach. "It's Bach to Nature for Yo-Yo Ma," the Toronto Star proclaimed. The garden is made up of six smaller gardens, reflecting the traditional movements in the music: prelude, allemande, courante, sarabande, menuett, and gigue.
Her firm has designed the award-winning annual garden display for the Isabella Gardner Museum at the New England Garden Show, as well as hundreds of home gardens and public gardens all over the United States.
Messervy studied art history, architecture and city planning, and early in her career worked in Kyoto, Japan, as an apprentice with garden master Kinsaku Nakane. Several years ago, they installed the Japanese garden at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.
Messervy moved to Westminster about six years ago after a 30-year career based outside Boston, and opened her design studio on the second floor of what used to be a plumber's workshop.
The white board in Messervy's colorful Saxtons River office lists all the gardens that her five-person design firm is currently tackling: private residential gardens, large public gardens, including the Rwandan project, a garden for the Saxtons River Elementary School and a reworking of the famed rose garden at the Arnold Arboretum outside Boston. There are two private gardens in neighboring Vermont towns, and a memorial garden for a children's school near Boston. In the case of a small private elementary school, the theme is playful: beavers – the school's mascot. The garden features twig structures resembling a beaver lodge, and its boundaries are marked off with what appears to be beaver-gnawed saplings.
Messervy hopes to return to the African nation this summer, and says the fund-raising and planning process for the Rwandan Garden of Forgiveness will take several years.
"It will take a long time. But it will be enough even if it's just a beautiful place," Messervy said.
Susan.smallheer@rutlandherald.com
25