Floral Memories - Birmingham

The Botanical Gardens
Birmingham, Alabama


Memory is an interesting phenomenon. Over time we tend to remember the good things that have happened to us more completely than the bad things, unless these things are truly dreadful and branded into our beings, only to recur as flashbacks or nightmares, sometimes far into the future. Today offered me an interesting, perhaps profoundly healing, experience of selective memory.

Eight years ago I experienced a catastrophic life event that has kept me away from Birmingham for nearly a decade. I have been willing to go anywhere on earth except here, despite having more than two decades of very happy experiences living in and visiting Birmingham, with its many good friends. One bad experience wiped out decades of good living.

Today I decided that it was about eight years past the time I should have faced my demons of dark memory. Recently I have been realizing that running from demons of fear only gives them more power. A two hundred and seventy mile journey brought me back to the epicenter of my greatest anxieties. As had been my practice for many years when visiting here, before the incantations of fear kept me away from the Magic City, I made my first stop at the Botanical Gardens. These gardens at one time in the distant past provided me great comfort and refuge when going through a yet more remote life challenge. Twenty years ago when facing the prospect of a terminal illness, these gardens helped me find life anew in a spectacular way. There was no more important place on earth to me than these gardens.

What did I find here today? Life, actually. The infinite happy memories that made these gardens so important to me and gave me life in the remote past may just be able to give it to me once again. Today my experiences in the gardens were devoid of fear, my experience of the city without the panic that once had me trembling with anxiety.

Arriving just after lunchtime I found the gardens to be much better attended than I recalled them to have once been. A hundred or more species of annuals, perennials, woody plants, ornamental trees, and roses reminded me that some things do go on despite fear. The immense array of blooms reminds me that life can be more powerful than death, joy more powerful than fear. A garden really can be a place to have an encounter with God.

A stone table in the wild flower garden reminded me of the epic luncheons I shared with my dear friend Nancy as she traversed a very dark season of her life. We relished this game of who could outdo the other in opulence. I recalled hauling sterling, crystal, and hot chicken cordon blue to that granite table in a backpack while riding my bike.

The swing in the back corner of the rhododendron garden was the site of many a fine meal with a dear friend who was the love of my life for several years. I would arrive after driving five hours, absolutely famished and Jan would have these incredible hot meals packed in her wicker picnic baskets. It is true that the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach. I cannot recollect just how many incredible meals I enjoyed here in the gardens. Perhaps, now unleashed, more of these delightful memories will bubble to the surface of my consciousness in the days ahead.

Already another one has surfaced. I had just returned from a month in Vienna with some fine Russian Champagne I had picked up on a weekend journey in Hungary. The Alabama Symphony was set up for a sunset concert on the east lawn in front of the glass houses. I was with a dozen or more good friends and had that bottle of Champagne with me as well as some culinary contributions to a really opulent potluck al fresco. How healing must it be for me to remember a fabulous meal from twenty years ago rather than those dark terrors from eight years ago that drove me from this city?

In the glasshouses today I was reminded of a distant time when I was wandering around the same stone paths, wondering if I would really experience life again, or if terminal disease was my reality. I could recall the classical music being played by one of the gardeners working with the tropical delights, suggesting to me that life really was there to be embraced once again. The neurological death sentence was commuted and I have been since given another twenty-one years of life and the opportunity to see much of the world.

It was here in the main conservatory of the growing houses that I was inspired to write my first book of poetry and perhaps do one of the most important things I have ever done. Thirteen years ago it had been my plan to take a young girl to see the castles of England before her life was truncated by a hideous brain tumor. Alas, she was too ill to make it to the crenellated wonders of England, but she was able to make it with assistance to these gardens and become completely absorbed in the wonders of a roomful of exotic orchids in full bloom. I remember other lovers of these gardens being especially helpful to us that day. Susie looked very ill that day and I suspect those other patrons knew it was an important day for her. Those orchids were to be the last things Susie was to see from life that weren’t part of a hospital room. Today I took photographs of some of those very same orchids. The lighting was just right.

These gardens helped Susie to have a vibrant colorful end to a brutally short life. They helped me to find my way back to abundant and radiant life once before. Perhaps they will be the place from which I emerge from a dark night of the soul, which has cloaked me for three years. Facing the demons of long-entrenched fear in such a bucolic place of color and life can only increase the possibility of this happening.

“Eyes have not seen, ears have not heard, the hearts of men have not even imagined the things I have prepared for you.”