When we encourage creativity and tactile, hands-on contact with plants, we provide visitors a passport through the Green Door. On the other side of the Green Door awaits a playground, and like any good playground, it is also a school. Much of the learning in this playground happens where our five senses, stimulated by a heightened level of engagement with tangible touchable nature, activate our sixth sense—the imagination.

The seedpods of the wild indigo catch my eye and I pause to inspect. “These would make excellent boats for the fairy folks,” I muse as I pick a few and hold the dried pea-like pods in my hand. Disturbed by my presence, a white-throated sparrow flies from a nearby clump of switch grass. I heard his plaintive, “poor-sam-peabody-peabody” call earlier in the week, but now the snowy patch of feathers on his throat suggests that winter is at hand. My garden has been transformed from the lush vitality of the growing season to more somber shades of tan, gray, and brown. Yet despite the change of palette, I have once again stepped through the Green Door. Regardless of the season, stopping to notice plants, to experience their texture, fragrance, or form opens us to new discoveries and reveals aspects from both the real world of nature and the imaginative world of spirit.

Volunteer naturalist Molly Teviso-Rona assists customers at the Fairy Market.

A mother sits on a rock in the woods with three small children. She turns over a play building permit and reads aloud the simple building code printed on the back of the paper. The children are squirrelly and anxious to get started, yet appear to be listening:

Be respectful of the space. Please don’t pull up living plants….Fairies prefer homes built from natural material…. Use your imagination…. Don’t be a perfectionist…. Be safe, watch for poison ivy, ticks….

As she continues reading, a little girl chirps, “What’s a perfectionist?” I can’t hear the mother’s response, but the girl nods in understanding.

Two young home builders show off their newly constructed fairy house.

A boy, perhaps six years old with eager eyes, clutches a brown bag, opens it, reaches in, and hands a quarter-size cardboard token to one of the “shopkeepers” standing across the counter at the Fairy Market. The large tables hold several shallow boxes and baskets containing an assortment of natural treasures (seedpods, dried flowers, and pieces of lichen-encrusted bark), which participants can exchange for tokens. Homebuilders for the fairy folks are allowed to use nonliving materials, fallen leaves, sticks, stones, etc., found within the permitted building zone, but all other materials must be “purchased” with tokens.

“Is this the one you want?” a fairy-clad shopkeeper asks, as she leans across the counter to meet the youngster’s gaze. “Oh, that will indeed make a great stairway!” she says. Her eyes twinkle as she hands the carefully selected piece of grapevine tendril to the young builder. The shopkeeper then inquires as to how many more tokens the boy has in his bag.

“Eight,” he responds after a brief calculation. “This is my second purchase, I’ll be back,” he says, looking over his shoulder as he dashes away clutching the miniature stairway in one hand and his bag of tokens in the other.

A father crouches on the ground and peers into a hollow log recently converted into a fairy house. His children, a little boy and a younger girl, are beaming with pride. “Look Daddy, we used these little sticks to make a fenced-in-yard,” says the boy as he points to the toothpick-size fence posts, lined up to form a small enclosure.

“And I made them a bathtub from this curled up leaf,” chimes the girl, “and look we found an empty snail shell for their living room. We gave them a fireplace, a bed, a couch and everything.” The father oohs and aahs, then shows off the miniature swing set he just added to the fairy’s backyard. Who says fairy house building is just for kids?

Fairy houses are left behind as monuments to the imagination.

Building Inspector Deanna Rushing looks official with her cap, badge, and clipboard as she patrols the new construction in the High-Density Zone of the Fairy Village. While she could issue tickets for infractions of the building code, she encounters few of them. Mostly she and the other volunteer building inspectors are on hand to offer suggestions, minimize the impact on the grounds, and ensure that safety concerns like poison ivy and ticks are addressed.

After volunteering as a building inspector for Bernheim’s Fairy Village, Deanna is charmed. “Once participants select their site and have a chance to explore it, their imaginations expand.” she says. They discover all sorts of possibilities in the bits of bark, twigs, and such. The velvety leaves of common mullein and lambs ear (both available at the Fairy Market) might make great blankets or fairy upholstery, but there is something about getting to know a place tactilely that helps feed the imagination. Some twigs are sturdy yet flexible; pieces of sloughed bark are versatile and can be fashioned into tables, porches, overhangs, and even walls. The large waxy leaves of the southern magnolia feel like perfect fairy roofing material.

Deanna reports that children and their parents (also grandparents, uncles, and aunts) constructed their tiny dwellings with a real focus on making comfortable homes for the fairies. But according to Deanna, comfort wasn’t the only principle that guided their process. She said, “Some considered hygiene, nutrition, community, and lots of ways to have fun. There were climbing ropes and vines to get to different areas of the house, soft velvety couches or chairs made from mullein leaves, dried flowers and hickory nut shells, indoor and outdoor showers. There were lots of ‘secret’ places for fairies to do things that we might not be privy to—places drawn by the imagination but respectfully unexamined, lest the fairies find it uninhabitable. I think the kids’ and parents’ imaginations meet on equal footing.”

This fairy village and the magic of this day were a direct result of my involvement with NAI. In February 2009 during the NAI Region 3 Workshop in western Kentucky, Michael Kirschman, division director for Mecklenburg County Nature Preserves, approached me with his usual enthusiastic greetings. Then he added, “Wren, of all people, you have to incorporate a fairy house festival into your programming!”

Michael knew that I would be receptive to his suggestion. He’d seen some of the little fairy creatures I make from natural materials. He may have known that I made fairy houses and occasionally incorporated them into programs and activities over the years, but he correctly assumed that I had never hosted a fairy house festival. Michael’s enthusiasm was contagious as he shared how the staff at the Latta Plantation near Charlotte, North Carolina, pulled off an amazing fairy house festival the previous February. With Michael’s encouragement, photos, and statistics from the first fairy house festival and marketing ideas (such as adding a costume contest) shared by Gail Lemiec, the genius behind their event, I was able to successfully petition our programs committee to include fairy house building in a major event at Bernheim Arboretum and Research Forest. Bloomfest was on the calendar as a new annual spring event. But we needed something besides the scheduled plant lectures, hikes, and plant sales—something that may have broader appeal to families with small children. Thus when Bernheim lunched our first Bloomfest in May 2009, we incorporated our first fairy house village as a major part of the day’s activities.

We didn’t know what to expect. Some co-workers questioned the connection between making fairy houses and our mission (connecting people with nature). Some suggested that this sort of activity would probably appeal only to little girls of a certain age. Others were concerned about the potential for resource destruction. As interpreters, we know that an idea is only as good as its execution, and the execution is only as good as the marketing and organization of supplies and volunteers.

Our plans needed to address and minimize the impact on the building site and limit “willy-nilly” collecting of natural materials by visitors. Sometimes when you address one problem you create new opportunities. It occurred to me that we could limit the temptation of visitors to collect outside our designated “fairy construction zone” if we established a place for them to obtain additional materials, thus the Fairy Market. Here shoppers could select from a large variety of interesting natural materials (dried flowers, seed pods, grape vine tendrils). These materials were carefully collected and organized weeks in advance by staff and volunteers.

To prevent greedy grabbing of the market’s materials, we gave each permit holder a bag of 10 tokens (leftover leaf-shaped cutouts from a local greeting card factory). An unexpected bonus in establishing this market is that not only did it limit unbridled collecting of natural materials, it also gave participants an opportunity to touch and learn about the real world of nature in a more thoughtful manner. Shoppers at the Fairy Market selected from a variety of interesting natural materials spread out smorgasbord fashion. They encountered interpreters who in the guise of shopkeepers answered questions or added enough guided commentary to be helpful without being intrusive. The large acorn caps from saw tooth and bur oaks were favorite bathtub fixtures and the velvety red inflorescence of the giant cockscomb where especially popular as “upscale” pillows and upholstery materials.

Young builders practiced math and budgeting as they deliberated each purchase. A shopper might purchase a grapevine tendril for one token, or select a honey locust pod in exchange for two tokens. One basket contained dried flowers and a sign reading, “1 token = 5 flowers”.

In the construction zone, children and their parents freely searched and found all sorts of building materials such as pieces of bark, hollow logs, rocky grottos, and an assortment of “builders twigs”—the all-important structural support supplied by the various twigs and branches in the shape of letters, including Y, V, T, and W. In the process of searching, participants not only developed a more intimate connection with the plants, they also discovered creatures from the other kingdoms.

Even though the morning brought showers and limited construction, the afternoon clearing allowed fairy houses to spring up like mushrooms after a rain. Visitors built 106 fairy houses in just a few hours. Most of these were constructed by families. Moms, dads, and children were down on their haunches, looking closely at twigs, rocks, leaves. They were touching the earth and being touched by it. I like to imagine that they had stepped through the Green Door. They had certainly entered the place where children (and those of us who are still children at heart) are able to express the inner world of the spirit while connecting more intimately with the real world of nature.

It is easy to help your visitors step through the Green Door. There is no magic word to incant, no lock to fumble with, and no key to turn. Instead turn your attention to the green and growing things. With a little imagination, you and your visitors will more fully encounter the complexities and mysteries of the natural world. In the process you may not only discover the intricacies of aster blossoms and hollyhocks, but also the tiny stars and fairy gowns hidden there.

Recommended Reading
Sobel, David. (2001.) Children’s Special Places: Exploring the Role of Forts, Dens, and Bush Houses in Middle Childhood. Detroit, Michigan: Wayne State University Press.

Wren Smith is the interpretive programs manager for Bernheim Arboretum and Research Forest in Kentucky. Reach her at 502-955-8512, x227 or Wren@bernheim.org.

The time is right (or ripe) for our interpretive efforts to tap into the consciousness coalescing around locally produced food, food safety, nutrition, heirloom produce, sustainable practices, community gardens, edible landscapes, farmers markets, and community celebrations. Since plants are at the core of our food chain and central to this emerging dialogue, our sense of taste provides an important pathway to building interpretive programs that tastefully nurture community while linking us with new partners and audiences that can help us protect the resources we cherish.

Heirloom vegetables and flowers grace the Tinsley House gardens at the Museum of the Rockies.

Farmers markets are abuzz with families connecting with nature through their association with the farmers and gardeners who usually provide more than fresh local produce. They swap stories, food samples, recipes, and smiles. I’ve noticed lots of smiles at farmers markets, and many “ums” and “yums” as folks sample slices of blood red brandywines and peach-colored melons, the juice of these treats running down chins. There is a bit of a clamor and a new urgency around food and its production. This is due in part to our desire to counter the trend in the rates of obesity and diet-induced diabetes in this country. It may be a desire for more authentic experiences—experiences that call forth something new in us—new ways of seeing, being, or perhaps thinking about the food we eat and asking more questions. Where does it come from, and from how far away? Has it been genetically modified, and if so, do I care or should I care? Some of the urgency may be the fact that some of the old-timers who can teach us how to grow and maintain organic fruit and other more challenging produce are passing away.

Whatever the reason, interest in linking more directly with our food is definitely on the rise. According to a USDA website, the number of farmers markets in the U.S. has grown from 1,755 in 1994 to 5,274 as of mid-2009.

Resources are Growing a Movement
Programs such as Growing a Green Generation, Wisconsin’s Fast Plants, The Farm to School Network, and the Slow Foods movement, as well as organizations like Louisville’s Food Literacy Project and 15 Thousand Farmers, are springing up like multiplier onions. These programs and organizations provide new partnership opportunities and potential for making our message relevant to new audiences. Books such as Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle and Michael Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma and In Defense of Food have helped nourish the growth of this greening food movement. The Edible Communities publications from The Edible Communities Inc. (ECI) have become a standard-bearer for the local foods movement in many cities. Like other Edible publications, Edible Louisville provides recipes and stories that highlight local farmers, gardeners, and others in the community that are finding new (and old) ways to celebrate our connection with the land and live more responsibly. Many nature centers, gardens, arboreta, and historic sites are digging in and providing festivals that celebrate the edible offerings of the seasons while helping visitors make connections between our food choices and the ecology of place.

Autumn Root Soup celebrations are remembered and celebrated anew each spring in the “spritely” daffodils.

Four years ago Thomas Jefferson’s beloved Monticello became the site of the annual Heritage Harvest Festival sponsored by the Southern Seed Exchange. This family-oriented program now attracts thousands and highlights organic and traditional agriculture and regional foods, including tasting sessions, workshops, and talks. Near the town of Mansfield, Missouri, what started as a garden festival in 1998 has grown into the region’s monthly Big Garden Festival sponsored by Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds.

In many states, programs like Maryland’s Master Gardeners are playing a significant role interpreting the importance of food plants in a campaign called Grow it, Eat it. The mission of this campaign is “to help Marylanders improve health and save money by growing fresh vegetables, fruits, and herbs using sustainable practices.” One of the stated goals of this campaign is to teach intensive, low-cost, sustainable growing techniques that maximize food production per area, protect and improve natural resources, and improve human health. Surely many interpretive sites would find partnership opportunities within such goals.

Edible Plants Connect Us with History and Ecology
Last August I visited the Living History Farm at the Museum of the Rockies, where they grow varieties of vegetables and flowers that were commercially available from 1890 to 1905. I was impressed not only by the beauty of the heirloom gardens but by the friendly costumed volunteers cooking in the Victorian-era log cabin known as the Tinsley House. It is clear from the garden displays and from talking with volunteers and staff that they want visitors to experience daily life from this time period as well as learn stories behind the plants growing there. The opportunity to smell a simmering pot of beans or a chance to taste old varieties of tomatoes certainly make the experience more memorable. The gift shop sells many of the seeds grown and gathered from their gardens and this provides funding for purchasing more heirloom seeds each season. The seeds also help people plant a living link with the region’s history. In my home state of Kentucky, staff of the 1890s farm in the Land Between the Lakes understands the importance of “tasteful” interpretation. Visitors are frequently greeted by the sights, sounds, and warming fragrances emanating from the cabin’s fireplace, where farm vegetables are transformed into fragrant and tasteful experiences.

Growing and gathering foods from the garden or from the wild can help us be more aware of our relationships with the wider community of life. For months my garden has been decked out each morning with the shimmering webs of the giant yellow garden spiders catching their breakfast while I gather mine. Since I started keeping bees, I’m more attentive to plants that produce food for “my girls.” Surely those asters and goldenrod growing by the fence will provide my bees (and the lovely native bees) with pollen and nectar.

An interest in harvesting or growing plants for food can help us be more attentive to what’s growing in and out of our gardens. This past April instead of hosting another invasive plants workshop, Bernheim Arboretum offered a three-hour Eat-a-Weed workshop to a full house! This workshop armed visitors with information on destructive invasive species, and provided visitors with something practical they could do to help control weeds: Eat them!

Plants Quench Our Thirst to Connect
Many communities grow crops and produce beverages that satisfy our thirst for authentic connections with places. The roadside stands selling ciders and fresh orange juice signify the seasons and may help us celebrate the genius loci when we travel. Some regions specialize in crafting distinctive beer or wine. In my community of Bardstown, Kentucky, bourbon is “boss” and provides opportunities to partner with distilleries linked with the region’s Bourbon Trail. In fact, Isaac W. Bernheim, founder of the Bernheim Arboretum and Research Forest, made his fortune in the bourbon industry and created Bernheim Forest with portions of that fortune. Maps and tours linking these local beverages provide opportunities to take a more spirited approach to our interpretive programs and offerings. Visitors sampling local beverages are open to experiencing these in the context of the local history, resources, and community and this provides opportunities to link resources, messages, and connect with new audiences.

In conclusion
Plants are primary in our exploration of food and can help us understand history and ecological relationships, and make our stories relevant, more enjoyable, and maybe even more digestible. Real food nourishes on many levels and this knowledge is catching on! Administrators, marketers, and interpreters who ignore this trend may miss opportunities for growing sustainable and new audiences.

For More Information
Kingsolver, Barbara, Camille Kingsolver, and Steven L. Hopp. 2007. Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. New York: HarperCollins.

Pollan, Michael. 2006. The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals. New York: Penguin Press.

Pollan, Michael 2008. In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto. New York: Penguin Press.

Websites & Organizations
Edible Communities. www.ediblecommunities.com/content

The Farm to School Network. www.farmtoschool.org

Slow Foods International. www.slowfood.com

Growing Healthy Kids. www.foodsecuritypartners.org/growing-healthy-kids

Wren Smith is the interpretive programs manager for Bernheim Arboretum and Research Forest in Kentucky. Reach her at 502-955-8512, x227 or Wren@bernheim.org.

While it may be second nature for us to speak about the view from a favorite overlook or the architectural design of our visitor centers and various other sight-dependent features and creatures, we often miss opportunities to engage visitors in sensory-rich experiences provided by the Green Kingdom. Unlike animals, plants can’t run, crawl, or fly away and thus are easily accessible. Our sense of smell is particularly conducive to sowing the seeds of memories that may last a lifetime.

Visitors enjoy the fragrance of lemon balm in a Bernheim garden.

A Tale of a Smell
To this day the smell of ground ivy whirls me back to childhood evenings hunting nightcrawlers in a graveyard with my dad. For me, this memory, redolent with the earthy pungency of this creeping and weedy herb, is infused with imagery and meaning. In my mind’s eye I can clearly see two shadowy figures: one a grown man and the other a small girl of nine or 10. In the misty darkness following a summer rain, we are sweeping our flashlight beams across the ground, between the rows of headstones, and under the boughs of hemlocks. In this damp and odoriferous place, the ground ivy, fragrant and fecund, seems woven into a living burial shroud. But we are not there to honor the dead. We are there to catch the living—the shimmering glint of these enormous annelids as they wiggle up through the ground ivy on a warm, wet summer’s eve.

Nightcrawlers keep part of the body in their earthen burrows, so they can quickly slip out of danger and out of reach. Like my dad, I learned to move slowly, imitating the great blue heron we often admired on our fishing trips. I learned to hold my thumb and forefinger like the heron’s beak, then inch closer and closer, until I could grab the slime-covered ground hugger and gently tug it out of the moist earth, and into our awaiting bait bucket.

To this day, the smell of ground ivy not only fills me with these images, lessons, and memories, but also tenderness towards my dad, who furthered my bond with nature on our many fishing trips, where we used those nightcrawlers as bait. The odor of ground ivy also reminds me of an experience Dad and I shared with “exploding nightcrawlers”—but that’s a less tender tale for another time.

Follow Your Nose
Dianne Ackerman, author of A Natural History of the Senses, explains that our sense of smell developed from the oldest part of our brain, the olfactory lobe. Thus plant odorants (tiny molecules that carry odors) have a long shelf life in our memory. Because of this, you can invite visitors to tap into their own memories and use this olfactory information to conjure up “the ghosts” of past experiences that can link visitors to the present. Whether using actual plant fragrances or drawing on those from memory, plants can heighten interpretive imagery and allow visitors a more personal experience.

Despite the fact that our sense of smell provides a direct path to memory and meaning, many interpreters and site designers ignore the olfactory option for enhancing and deepening visitor experiences. But most of us (as well as our visitors) can easily recall a fragrance from childhood and a favorite memory associated with it. See for yourself. What fragrance connects you to a favorite childhood place or experience? If you find a powerful and fragrant memory, more than likely that remembered fragrance is rooted in the Green Kingdom. Newly mowed hay, tobacco hanging in the barn, fresh baked bread, lilacs, lavender, peppermint from the creek, the sweet smell of decaying fall leaves, or the pungent odors emanating from the salt marsh are just some of smells many of our visitors recall. Some interpretive sites encourage visitors to follow their noses, and these sites may be hot on the trail of the sustained visitor (a visitor that samples, then returns again and again for more filling offerings). Longwood Gardens in Pennsylvania initiated such an ongoing series of programs known as Fragrant Fridays. Visitors have opportunities to explore a fragrant plant that is highlighted each month. This July they featured Lovely Lavender, and provided visitors opportunities throughout the month to learn lavender lore as well as how to grow and use lavender in making scented gifts, edible treats, and recipes. These sorts of sensory-rich engagements will have visitors coming back for more and create sustained and deeper connections.

The expression “right under your nose” is an apt one, but full of irony when you consider how the sense of smell is often far removed from most teaching/learning experiences. Many children and adults don’t seem to know how to get the most from their noses. For instance, many plants have more fragrance in their foliage than in their flowers, and I’ve noticed visitors often take only a “wimpy” whiff of proffered and fragrant greenery. Thus you may need to demonstrate how to release volatile and odoriferous oils by gently pinching a few leaves (perhaps of mint, lemon balm, fennel, etc.) then lightly rolling the leaves between your hands before taking a deep whiff. I once showed some young visitors how to release the fragrances of lemon balm and mountain mint. I was shocked afterwards when one little boy enthusiastically exclaimed, “Wow! What did you spray on these plants to make them smell so good?”

Imagine the odors in a crowded household before modern sanitation and ventilation. For centuries many fragrant plants served as strewing herbs. Forerunners of our modern air fresheners, strewing herbs are fragrant herbs strewn on floors. These herbs released their fragrance as people walked on them, truly changing the chemistry in the room. Sweet annie, thyme, sage, mint, and rosemary were useful for masking and replacing the many unpleasant odors. Providing visitors with the chance to crush and sniff various fresh or dried strewing herbs (perhaps while showing a can of air freshener) may convey the intangible relief that fragrant plants offer suffering noses. In fact, some herbs contain chemicals that may actually inhibit odor-causing bacteria. Many cultures also use plants in purification rituals or in community celebrations. Years ago, I was visited by a young Iranian woman who, upon smelling the cedar burning in my wood stove, became excited and a bit homesick. Inhaling deeply, her eyes sparkled as she explained how her family burned a similar wood as an incense during special family celebrations.

Perhaps you work at a historic site and can invite visitors to an early kitchen where the pungent odor of garlic hangs in the doorway or some spicebush tea simmers on a wood stove. Fragrance gardens provide a feast of accessible interpretive opportunities that please other senses as well. In addition to smells and their tales, visitors experience the great hum of life as bees, butterflies, hummingbirds, and clearwing moths dance and buzz about on brightly colored blossoms amid textured leaves. Many sunflowers offer visitors a warm and resinous fragrance and demand attention with their bright colors, which are also visited by attentive bees. While visitors get added pleasure when they experience fragrant plants actually growing and gracing a landscape, don’t let the lack of an odiferous garden dissuade you from using plants and their fragrance at your site. Plants and plant parts (dried leaves, essential oils, and spices) are portable and ever available. If you can accurately and deftly fit plant fragrances into mission-based themes, you can add this magic to your programs. Take a deep breath: look around, what allies from the Green Kingdom can you enlist to connect with peoples’ everyday lives? You and those green friends may create memories that last a lifetime.

Wren Smith is the interpretive programs manager for Bernheim Arboretum and Research Forest in Kentucky. Reach her at 502-955-8512, x227 or Wren@bernheim.org.

For thousands of years plants have been linked with many ancient traditions as spell binders, capable of working specific magic. While I’m not suggesting that interpreters practice these ancient crafts in the literal sense, I believe plants can be powerful allies in our efforts to restore a deeper connection to our cultural and ecological heritage.

Even dandelions can be captivating. The author’s niece Rylie Marie investigates.

Stories Restore
There are stories in land, stories in the rocks, in the trees, and in the plants growing in your backyard. Plants offer interpreters stories that connect the histories of people, places, and animals, stories that sweep across cultures, languages, and even species, stories of invasion, cooperation, opportunity, survival, love, and loss. Unearthing these stories provides a treasure trove of interpretive possibilities. Our real aim in learning and sharing plant stories, as well as other stories, should never be about dispensing “nickel knowledge” of natural history, but about helping visitors restore a sense of their own roots in the land. Anchoring these plant stories in universal concepts makes them more memorable, meaningful, and, at times, magical. Ecologist and writer Gary Paul Nabhan suggests that we “re-story” the land by making it a part of our story, our seasonal celebrations, our community gatherings and festivals.

It is easier to protect places that are imbued with familiar and cherished stories. In his thought-provoking book, Cultures of Habitat, Nabhan says that if we track down these stories to the finest detail, our own lives will be enriched. He adds:

In every biotic community, there are story lines that fiction writers would give their eyeteeth for…. Dormancies of lotus seeds that outdistance Rip van Winkle’s longest nap. Promiscuities amongst the neighboring oak trees that would make even Nabokov and his Lolita blush.

Nabhan asks, with the myriad of stories around us, how many of them do we recognize as touching our lives in some way?

Most Americans can identify thousands of brand names and logos, but fewer than 10 common plants in their own backyards. These plants exist outside the zone of perceived relevance. Ecologist Aldo Leopold reminded us that the first rule of tinkering is to keep all the parts. Inherent in this rule is the notion that we should also know what the parts are; otherwise how can we hope to know what’s there, or what’s missing, or in the case of invasive species, what shouldn’t be there? How can we restore our connection to the places we want to protect without the stories from the Green Kingdom?

Learning the names from these other lives is one starting point to learning these stories. Once you know the name of a plant (or animal) you can begin to learn how its story fits into the stories of other members of an ecological community and even into our own stories. You might even discover the poetry of its name. Although I’m not suggesting that the only way to appreciate plants (or anything) is to attach a name or label to them; I’m simply saying that names are a tool, and as such, can be used to build bridges or barriers. It’s all a matter of application.

In the presence of a skilled and knowledgeable interpreter, both the common and botanical names can be used to create an array of connections with the everyday lives of any visitor.

Secret Stories from the Green Kingdom
You might say that there is a whole galaxy of interpretive stories hidden in the names of plants—sunflower, moonflower, cosmos, star chickweed, and aster, to mention a few. Martha Barnette’s small but delightful book A Garden of Words is a valuable etymology resource on the origins of plant names and stories. According to Barnette, the name daisy is in reference to the sun being the “eye of the day” or day’s eyes. Aster is certainly a fitting name for a flower that resembles the celestial “blooms” of the night sky. Likewise the genus name Stellaria is appropriate for the star-like blossoms of the giant or star chickweed, Stellaria pubera. The edges of our eastern woodlands are laced in September with the white flowers of white snakeroot, judged by many to be the culprit in the death of Abraham Lincoln’s mother who died from milk sickness. Cows ingesting the plant passed a toxic chemical through their milk. This plant belongs to a genus in the aster family that is known to hybridize freely, and thus some authorities question which species is the felon in this story. Plant stories are often mysteries!

Rylie Marie is captivated by summer’s bounty.

Yaupon holly, with the colorful species name Ilex vomitoria, points to a story worth telling to a group of middle school students who may think they aren’t going to enjoy learning about binominal nomenclature, the scientific two-part classification system. I love introducing visitors to the soapwort growing at Bernheim Arboretum and Research Forest in Kentucky. This plant goes by several other common names, including bouncing bet and fullers herb, each name has its own collection of stories. Wort is from the Old English word wyrt, meaning plant, herb, or root. The name soapwort makes sense in view of the plant’s use as a delicate laundry agent. The plant was also called fullers herb, a holdover from the process of washing new carded wool or fulling. Even the scientific name, Saponaria officinalis, is redolent with meanings and stories. For starters, the genus provides a clue that the plant may contain saponins, agents that produce suds. The species name, officinalis, points to its history in the official apothecaries, the forerunners of our modern drug stores.

Even Weeds Have Stories to Tell
Examining most lawns reveals numerous interpretive stories “hidden in plain site.” Since weedy species are abundant and widely distributed, visitors are likely to reencounter these plants, and such repeated contact reinforces these stories. Dandelions are often one of the first plants noticed by children. The yellow suns are easily grasped by little hands, and children beam as they offer a bouquet to their mothers.

“Oh Sweetie, thank you, but that’s just a weed,” I recently overheard a mother say. Her response was gentler than many other responses to this floral offering I’ve heard over the years. However, the label of weed points to only a part of the story.

Author and naturalist Tavia Cathcart says, “The name dandelion comes from a French phrase dent de lion (tooth of the lion).” It’s easy for visitors and even little children to see a possible connection between this name and the sharp green teeth on the edges of dandelion leaves. Not native to the United States, but now naturalized widely, dandelions provide us with tales of travels, trials, and culinary creations, as well as myth, magic, and medicine that extend at least to the 10th and 11th centuries. Dandelions also provide high drama when viewed through the lens of warfare.

The Green Kingdom is Not Always the Peaceable Kingdom
In one of the best interpretive programs I’ve ever attended at an NAI National Workshop, Fran Blanchard and Mary Ann Bonnell reminded us that plants and their stories can be filled with all the drama of a battlefield. They also clearly conveyed their theme that plants aren’t passive in their defense of the homeland. Dressed in faux military regalia and representing the Secretary of Homeland Security and the Secretary of State, these creative interpreters staged a mock pre-battle press conference (complete with charts, maps, and graphs) from the viewpoint of plants. Workshop participants were quickly shunted into the role of press agents vying to ask questions of our illustrative leaders. Our capable commanders demonstrated numerous tactics employed by plants (chemical warfare, armored defenses of thorns and spines, etc.) in defense of their territory.

Years later, the universal concepts and relevant stories shared in that session have helped me see new stories in the land. I find new drama among the dandelions, as I now witness the turf battles and ongoing skirmishes between fastidious landowners and these “lions of the lawn.” I’ve realized that dandelions’ strategic arsenal not only includes prolific paratroopers, launched from familiar fluffy seed heads, but also underground taproots that lay claim to their territory with tenacity. Dandelions even appear to have a highly effective intelligence agency. They seem to know how low to keep their crowns, before counter attacks of land owners on lawn tanks (lawnmowers). Once the tanks have moved on, dandelions quickly raise their victory flags of yellow suns. Fortunately, universal concepts aren’t limited to those associated with warfare.

The Business of Blooming
When we describe our favorite spring wildflowers, we often use such words as delicate, fragile, and lovely. All of these descriptors are certainly accurate but they can belie the hidden tenacity of these so called genteel ladies of our spring woods. The real stories are a lot less tame and point towards some of the earliest business strategies in the “world’s oldest profession.” Contrary to popular belief, spring wildflowers usually don’t disappear from view because they succumb to freezing or frost. The real reason has more to do with the economics of ecology than frailty or frivolity. As much as their beauty may please us, spring wildflowers mean business, and most flowers are in the sex business.

Woodland wildflowers are supremely alluring and enterprising. They must take advantage of a small window of opportunity that opens in the woodlands just as daylight begins to lengthen but before the trees leaf out and block the sun. In other words, they only have a few weeks to complete their reproductive life cycle. It isn’t just the sun that they need. Survival of the next generation of viable seeds often depends on attracting pollinators that carry pollen (usually) from the male parts of other flowers. Similar to some human enterprises, flowers advertise their wares. Bright banners flap in the breeze like colorful flags at used car lots. Others offer rich perfumery. “Stop here,” they seem to say in their sexiest chemical lexicon. “We’ve got what you want, you’ve got what we need.” Some flowers like violets offer clearly marked runways so that insects can find their way to the pollen or nectar. Many flowers even offer landing pads. How’s that for customer service?

There is deception among the flowers. Some orchids imitate bees, and according to Sharman Apt Russell, author of The Anatomy of a Rose, there are some flowers that don’t live up to their end of the bargain. These trick pollinators into expending energy to visit them and offer nothing in return. Cooperation, competition, deception, and manipulation—flowers are not only full of melodrama, they are full of universal concepts.

The Green Story in a Nutshell
Mystery and reciprocity live at the heart of the plant kingdom. A squirrel buries hundreds of acorns and eats some of them. A tree grows from one of them, and its leaves are munched by a caterpillar. The caterpillar is eaten by a bird. The bird lands on the branch outside my window and sings. Sunlight has become not only root but also wing, not only leaf but song.

For many of us this past winter was rough and long, thus we welcomed spring with its unfurling fire of green light with even more gratitude than usual. Although it is late spring at this writing, the Green Kingdom is lush, lovely, and alive here in Kentucky. But even if you live in a part of the country where the seasonal changes are less obvious, there is no escaping the inevitable fact that all living things are woven into a fabric whose warp consists of various shades of green.

Green is the color represented by photosynthesis, the solar-powered process so necessary for the richness of life on earth. In the presence of sunlight, pigments of chlorophyll like millions of miniature alchemists turn invisible molecules of water and carbon dioxide into visible forms of grass, leaves, buds, flowers, and trees. This turning of the invisible to visible and back again lies at the heart of photosynthesis and thus at the heart of the living earth. As the original alchemists, plants tap into the power of the sun and supply the energy for the planet. As interpreters, we are constantly looking for ways to create this sort of magic as we strive to restore our connections to the places we love. Learn more stories from the Green Kingdom; share them with your friends, family, and visitors. Chlorophyll may be at the heart of photosynthesis, but relevant stories are at the heart of our interpretive efforts. The Green Kingdom provides interpreters with stories that may help us turn sunlight into song.

Resources for Connecting with Plant Stories
Barnette, Martha. 1992. A Garden of Words. New York: Times Books.

Cathcart, Tavia, and Dennis Horn. 2005. Wildflowers of Tennessee the Ohio Valley and the Southern Appalachians. Auburn, Washington: Lone Pine Publishing.

Sanders, Jack. 1995. Hedgemaids and Fairy Candles. Camden Main: Ragged Mountain Press.

Sanders, Jack. 2003. The Secrets of the Wildflowers. Guilford, Connecticut: The Globe Pequot Press.

Wren Smith is the interpretive programs manager for Bernheim Arboretum and Research Forest in Kentucky. Reach her at 502-955-8512, x227 or Wren@bernheim.org.

“When we garden, whether we realize it or not, we bring to bear our previous life experiences, our memories of childhood and travel, our family relations, our readings, our dreams and aspirations, our moral standards, character flaws, our sensuality, and grandiosity of spirituality. All of these are part of the invisible garden.”

—Dorothy Sucher, The Invisible Garden

From my upstairs window, my desk overlooks my sprawling garden. Usually, on a day off, that’s where I’m either puttering around, weeding, planting, or just gawking. (I do a lot of gawking!) Yet today, despite the fact that the sky is bachelor button blue and the air is pleasantly cool, I’m compelled to write about gardening in an attempt to get at the core of something that has been nagging at me for weeks. Like gardening, writing has a way of bringing to fruition things previously hidden. I love Dorothy Sucher’s idea of the invisible garden, in which she confirms my suspicion that there is far more to gardens and gardening than meets the eye.

As an interpreter, I like to think of this green-tinted invisible realm as the place where seeds, memories, and meanings (ours and our visitors) germinate; and what blooms is sometimes expected and sometimes a surprise. When tended, this garden has the potential for creating some new way of thinking about life and thus our programs, projects, and encounters with others. Garden metaphors are so prolific that I may sound like “Mr. Gardener” from Peter Sellers’ movie Being There. Nevertheless, I can’t help but muse as I gaze upon my own visible and vibrant garden, illuminated by soft morning light. The pink and red Shirley poppies twirl in the breeze like country dancers in their pink and red skirts, near the blue puffs of bachelor buttons; the rainbow chard gleams darkly and the row of lettuce casts a chartreuse smile. No, I must dig a bit deeper; even at the risk of stating the obvious, or worse, gilding the lily.

Interpreters are gardeners by nature.
We plant seeds when we provide provocative experiences—experiences that may become fruitful, perhaps years later. Not only do we plant the seeds, but sometimes we add water or compost to the seeds planted by others. Sometimes we weed, sometimes we mulch. Regardless, there is an act of faith that someone else will add to our efforts—will water, weed, or cultivate the seeds we plant. Gardening, even for our own pleasure is, after all, a community love affair with hope, involving interactions and exchanges on so many levels. This is especially true for our invisible gardens, the ones that we carry with us. We share our ideas, colorful stories, and dreams, and others share with us. Gardens, and plants in general, teach us the importance of reciprocity. Cross-pollination creates new possibilities. A garden, either real or metaphorical can be a garden of interpretive delights—one that hums, buzzes, blossoms, blooms, fades, and blossoms again, in ways that are sometimes hidden.

Wren’s garden mirrors the memory of her enchanted trip to the strawberry farm as a child.

Often there are others, even those who aren’t trained interpreters, who add interpretive “green” magic that transforms the ordinary into the extraordinary.Such experiences also plant seeds in the imagination and become part of the loamy fertility of our invisible gardens. One of my earliest memories is from a you-pick-it strawberry farm near my hometown of Shelbyville, Kentucky. The farmer not only provided opportunities for us to pick strawberries to take home or to pop directly in our mouths, she also set a table in her garden for us children to make strawberry shortcakes. While only four or five years old, I sat wide-eyed as a daisy, drinking in the loveliness. The simple but elegant table surrounded by flowers, lush green hedges, and wonderful winged creatures—birds, butterflies, and bees coming and going about their business. Some I observed diving head-long into trumpet-shaped lilies, others hovered gingerly on glistening wings over gold-dusted stamens.

Yes, the table was adorned with a lovely white lace cloth, napkins, and crystal bowls, piled high with whipped cream, sugar, and strawberries. But there was something more, something akin to magic emanating from that experience, something that planted itself in the receptivity of my childhood imaginings.Decades later, as I prepared a small outdoor table for dinner guests, I gazed at my own lush gardens and the memory from my childhood at the you-pick-it strawberry farm winged its way back with the full force of its significance. I looked around at the incredible beauty before me—my lace tablecloth, red and white slices of apples on a blue plate, pink lilies catching and holding the colors of the setting sun, bees and butterflies gathering their treasures from the blossoms. Everything was glowing and humming. I realized that this childhood experience had become a part of me, and I realize now, after reading Sucher’s book, that the experience has become a part of my invisible garden.

Creating a garden that mirrored this early experience helped me realize that images can act as potential seeds in our lives.
Encounters with the vital force of nature, especially when young, can shape the landscape of our lives. Indeed, that happened with me. I created a world that sprouted directly from those buried memories of my enchanted trip to the strawberry farm so many years before. Images from special times and places can provide moments of deep seeing or being, and have the potency of seeds. Like seeds these images are capable of being carried about in our psyches for years before germinating.

Isaac W. Bernheim, the founder of Bernheim Arboretum and Research Forest, carried the image of his beloved trees with him from his childhood homeland of Germany when he set sail for America in 1867. Although just a teenager, soon Isaac was traveling from village to village with his horse and a peddler’s pack of Yankee notions through the Pennsylvania forest. I can imagine young Isaac among those towering trees with the morning mist scattering the sunlight, producing that marvelous and meditative Tindal effect. Perhaps those mornings of solitude surrounded by trees provided the idea growing conditions for the seeds that eventually sprouted into a 14,000-acre arboretum and research forest. Could such a legacy have grown without those first seed images planted early in his childhood?

The idea that we become what we truly see or behold is nothing new. Even William Wordsworth’s proclamation that “the child is father to the man” (and woman) attests to this idea. Finding ways to use this notion creatively may be needed more now than ever, especially as the age of technology supplants much of our direct contact with nature. Richard Louv’s highly acclaimed book Last Child in the Woods attests to this change in culture and seems to give voice to the collective consciousness on this matter. Regardless of your view on technology with its rewards and drawbacks, we are challenged to find ways to provide this and future generations with experiences that have the potency of seeds. These experiences help root us to the earth and can become partners in the way we approach life. We also have an obligation to create worlds that are worth replicating, full of green and growing things, flowers, the hum and buzz of fellow creatures and wild places—visible and invisible gardens!

It is up to us to create experiences that nurture deep seeing and being.
While it may not be desirable for us to plant lots of enchanted strawberry gardens (especially when you consider the realities of heavy pesticides used for such), we do need to create worlds or experiences that nurture deep seeing and being. When we do, we not only plant a seed but we also make a map out of memory, a map that can lead us and our visitors deeper into our own natures, deeper into the heart of the world, and perhaps deeper into the heart of the great mystery. Isn’t that what really happens inside a seed? Isn’t this interpretation at its best?

The farmer who made her you-pick-it strawberry farm such an extraordinary experience probably had no idea what would sprout from her extra effort. She must have known however, the value of spreading magic and planting real and invisible seeds. You may never see the results of the extra effort you make to create visitor experiences that plant possibilities for beauty, understanding, or a sense of connection. Rest assured, though, your efforts may be more fruitful than you’ll ever know.

Wren Smith is a poet and an interpretive programs manager for Bernheim Arboretum & Research Forest. Wren welcomes your insights and comments at Wren@bernheim.org or 502-955-8512 x227.

We are all poets, and every poem is an interpretation.

The poet is no more mysterious than is the scientist. One is in love with words, the other with numbers. For either, it’s the beauty of the formulation that counts, not its acceptance. For Einstein, E=mc2 was pure poetry. That it could change the world was in distant second place to the breakthrough in understanding it encapsulated. For Robert Frost, the imagery of two roads diverging in a wood was an equally elegant formula for describing life. The thought that schoolchildren might be repeating the lines somewhere ages and ages hence probably never crossed his mind.

We are fond of saying that poetry has the power to awaken the senses, but these two examples suggest that we ought to credit the poet, at least, with somewhat more modest objectives. The acceptance of a poem is profoundly anticlimactic; as W. H. Auden so poetically observed: “The publication of a volume of verse is like dropping a rose petal in the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.” The formulation is everything; if the poem resonates with others, that’s a bonus.

It seems highly unlikely that Emerson was the first to challenge us to seek out our inner poet, but he probably said it best by insisting that our poetry will come out in other ways if we choose not to write it. In fact, the ability to live our poetry seems vastly superior to just committing it to paper. While we may deny our inner poet, we cannot deny our feelings, our senses, and our emotions—the very intangibles that make us distinctly human and distinctively individual. Those things are the essence of life as well as the building blocks of poetry.

If we are all poets, living our poetry, then it follows that poetry is all around us. If you haven’t noticed any today, try putting on the glasses of your inner poet so that you might enjoy the poetry in a falling leaf, a random act of kindness, a passing cloud, or a tax refund. Just in the past few hours, I witnessed three acts of living poetry that are not easily converted to the written word. On the morning news, I heard a report of a dog rescuing a litter of kittens from a burning building. This was followed by an item about a mortgage buyer, at auction, giving the home back to its tearful owner. Later, while kayaking on the White River, I watched a grandfather teaching a child to fly fish and then how to gently release his catch. Such living poetry almost defies written interpretation, and yet, each contains the paradoxical seed of a great poem.

Just as a painting or a photograph is not the real thing, a poem is always an inadequate interpretation of living poetry. As with the painting, the written poem contains no small amount of artistic license. The poet has no obligation to accurately portray the scene, only an artistic obligation to be interesting. Like any good interpretation, poetry is an attempt to artfully portray a story, provoking interest, while seeking to be relevant, focused, and informative. I particularly like Max Bodenheim’s definition because it neatly addresses all of these criteria: “Poetry is the impish attempt to paint the wind.” In these nine words, Bodenheim demonstrates two additional principles: those of economy of words and organization of thought—the right word in exactly the right place!

With the possible exception of prehistoric rock etching, poetry may well be humans’ first attempt at interpreting their world. For centuries, in the absence of a written language and readily available writing materials, the poet/bard, sometimes using musical accompaniment, provided our primary interpretations of life and history, using sagas that were provocative, interesting, relevant, focused, and artful. The principles of interpretation, not articulated until the mid-1950s by Freeman Tilden, were firmly in place in the ancients’ job description for their poets. The Roman poet, Horace, writing in 65 BC, called poets “the first teachers of mankind.” Now, more than 2,000 years later, poetry remains unconstrained and undiminished by today’s still limited tools of communication technology. In the current resurgence of interest in poetry, we may actually be seeing a backlash to the growing impersonality of modern communication.

Poetry is intensely personal because it is fundamentally emotional, calling on our senses and getting us to think in different ways about the accepted and the commonplace. It is no coincidence that totalitarian regimes are known for locking up their poets or, at the very least, keeping them under surveillance and labeling these basically peace-loving artists-with-words as dangerous to the state. For the oppressor, words are dangerous because they promote thinking, and while words cannot be purged, wordsmiths can. Most of us would agree with Rudyard Kipling that “words are the most powerful drug ever used by mankind.” And then along comes Pablo Neruda, who nicely puts that power in perspective by pointing out that “peace goes into the making of a poet as flour goes into the making of bread.”

“I am not a teacher, but an awakener” says Frost. The poet is not content with limiting sensorial exploration to the traditional five of taste, touch, sight, sound, and smell. Our senses of peace, place, and purpose are fertile fields for poetry to explore, as are intuition and the sense of wonder, because they allow us to look inside ourselves and discover not just our inner poet, but our inner nature, our beliefs. To allow ourselves an open mind to examine the paradoxical in our beliefs may be the ultimate sense of freedom—freedom to discover one’s self.

Some of our less physical senses are no easier to turn off than are the senses of taste or touch. Along with senses of beauty and danger, our sense of direction (our inner compass), the sense of time (our inner clock), and the senses of balance, motion, and distance all work to keep us out of trouble as we literally and metaphorically create and walk the tightropes of our lives. Spidermen, indeed!

The collection of senses connecting the inner self with the world around us, often curiously labeled common sense, provides endless fields for poetic exploration. Without, at least, a sense of humor we’d be hard pressed to deal with the often bizarre situations that the world throws at us. A sense of appropriateness is invaluable in countless settings where the dictates of order, civility, behavior, proportion, and protocol define social acceptability. In fact, our sense of appropriateness has been one of our richest sources of both humor and poetry.

Over time, we develop complex senses of justice and honor as we maneuver among the land mines of fairness, respect, loyalty, pride, ethics, and responsibility. Our sense of worth guides us in making judgments about needs and wants, and cost versus value. And our sense of compassion naturally reaches out to embrace love, caring, sympathy, empathy, and sadness. Just imagine how many times the injustice of unrequited love has diminished someone’s sense of worth over the millennia.

In poetry we find a safe haven for dealing with the paradoxical nature of life. Our human inconsistencies are wildly evident throughout our common senses. For example, the senses of pleasure and guilt seem to have neatly teamed up to fuel two of the world’s largest economies: entertainment and religion. And, our sense of the spiritual or supernatural allows us to cope, at least in superficial ways, with the phenomena that science has yet to explain—the sacred, the metaphysical, the mystical, and the magical. If God could create the perfection of something like a tree, why bother with fools like me (with apologies to Joyce Kilmer)?

Our many senses exist at remarkably different levels of development and respond to an infinite variety of settings, making us truly sensate and, hopefully, sensible beings. It is not just our sense of beauty, but every one of our senses that exists in the eye of the beholder. But “poetry is something more than just good sense,” said Samuel Taylor Coleridge. That something more is how we feel about what we sense, feelings that range from indifferent to passionate. The poet creates “weapons of mass instruction” by combining two common household ingredients: words and passion.

If poetry does have the ability to awaken our myriad senses, it surely does so by recognizing the paradoxical in life and laying it bare with passion and clarity. And, if poetry is to fully use its ability to interpret life, it must be available, it must be demystified. It must be appreciated and valued for its emotional logic, just as we value science for its analytic logic.

Emotional logic—the realization that humans can be simultaneously subjective and objective, that there are truths that are satisfying to both sides of the brain—may well be what poetry does best. The appeal of poetry is the appeal of words, and the appeal of words is the appeal of the imagination. It is tempting to substitute the word power for the word appeal, however, power is not the right word simply because poetry is to power as waves are to the shore. Power, for the poet, would only be a burden. Poetry does not play in the power arena; it is the voice you hear after the arena grows silent, when the players have left, when the light of dawn reminds us that the arena is not the real world we live in.

“When power corrupts, poetry cleanses.” —John F. Kennedy

Will La Page is the author of Voices from the Park, and A Park is A Poem on the Land, available from PublishAmerica.com, and Parks for Life, from Venturepublish.com.

In Interpretation for Park Visitors, William Lewis introduces the concept of the interactive threesome. In describing this dynamic “Y” intersection where You the interpreter meets Your visitors at Your site, Lewis inspires the poet in me to see the similarities between the interpretive and poetic processes. After all, at the heart of interpretation is a poetic sensibility that is dynamic, creative, and inspiring.

Exploring the Work and Words of Poets can Inspire our Interpretive Efforts
We interpreters are as busy as most in the whirlwind of modernity. However it’s good to slow down and listen to other voices, to find amid all the details and deadlines still pools for reflection that resonate with our inner landscape. The poetic landscape is such a place. Freeman Tilden said, “An interpreter must be some kind of artist and at best a poet.” He understood that the same processes used by poets to hone their skills are also necessary to create powerful interpretive experiences. As you read the following excerpt from Mary Oliver’s A Poetry Handbook, substitute the words interpretation and interpreter for poetry and poet and you will see that the passage rings true. Both disciplines arise from the same fertile earth and the inner landscape and both, arguably, have similar aims.

Poetry is one of the ancient arts, and it began, as did all the fine arts, within the original wilderness of the earth. Also it began through the process of seeing…feeling… hearing … smelling, and touching, and then remembering—I mean remembering in words—what these perceptual experiences were like, while trying to describe the endless invisible fears and desires of our inner lives. A poet uses the actual, the known event or experience to elucidate the inner, the invisible experience….

Whether writing poetry or prose, employing certain poetic devices helps make our language livelier and more evocative. In his book Interpretive Writing, Alan Leftridge reminds us that “poetry can provide emotional/intellectual responses not always possible in prose.” He also discusses how interpreters can and should use active verbs, alliterations, analogies, metaphors, similes, contrast and comparisons, and other techniques to clarify and energize their message. Although most of us routinely employ many of these poetic devices, we can become more attuned to their interpretive implications when we ponder our shared processes.

Poets use tangible things to convey intangible ideas, linking the known with the unknown.
Poet William Carlos Williams said, “There are no ideas…but things.” Williams was not suggesting that ideas don’t exist at all, but merely reminding us that ideas (whether shared by a poet or by an interpreter) are only available in the context of real things.

Mary Oliver echoes this notion in A Poetry Handbook.

In every instance something has to be known initially in order for the linkage and the informing quality of the comparison to work…. In the metaphoric device, this essence is then extended so that it applies to an unknown thing.

Beginning poets often omit concrete details from their early efforts. They try to tell rather than show their readers what they mean. They may write verse after verse containing “beautiful, lovely, peaceful days” and other similar abstractions. As they gain experience, however, they learn the value of using a more rooted language. Instead of saying “the beautiful blue sky,” they might say, “the sky, like a piece of polished turquoise shone above our heads.”

The Chilean poet Pablo Neruda celebrated everyday things in much of his poetry. The following lines are from his poem, “Ode to a Pair of Socks.”

Maru Mori brought me
a pair
of socks
that she knit with her
shepherd’s hands.
Two socks as soft
as rabbit fur.
I thrust my feet
inside them
as if they were
two
little boxes
knit
from threads
of sunset
and sheepskin….

By naming, knowing, or noticing the details of that which they love, poets can celebrate these “things.” In 1920, German-speaking poet Rainer Maria Rilke makes it clear in a letter to a friend, however, that really noticing or knowing about these “Things” can be difficult.

These things, whose essential life you want to express, first ask of you, “Are you free?”… and if the Thing sees that your are otherwise occupied, with even a particle of your interest, it shuts itself off…. In order for a Thing to speak to you, you must regard it for a certain time as the one and only phenomenon, which through your laborious and exclusive love is now placed at the center of the universe….

Interpretive Implications: Like inexperienced poets, new interpreters may be tempted to tell their audiences about beauty, loss, or the threat of extinction but fail to show them, either literally or figuratively, what they mean. Like poets, our awareness and our language should be “rooted” in the good earth of particular “things” or concrete imagery. Such attentiveness honors the vital force that we find there. Attention to the small details is essential but so too is the larger picture.

Poets sometimes bridge a perception gap between the small details and universal ideas by using a “telescoping” technique.
Poet Leonard Nathan, in A Diary of a Left-Handed Birdwatcher, tells of a phenomenon discussed among quantum physicists known as the Principle of Indeterminacy. According to this principle, the more we concentrate on the details the more we miss the whole and the more we concentrate on the whole the more we miss the details.

Using contrasting perspectives poets strive to reveal how the large world is infinitely connected to the small. When a poet focuses on something small and close at hand (say an acorn), then attempts to perceive the tree or even the forest, he or she is employing a telescoping technique. The following familiar lines by William Blake illustrate this approach:

To see the universe in a grain of sand, and heaven in a wildflower; hold infinity in the palm of your hand, and eternity in an hour.

When poets contrast the small world of details with the larger world of ideas and vice versa, they invite their readers to experience the ordinary in the light of the extraordinary.

Japanese poet Issa evoked the image of a mountain reflected in a dragonfly’s eye. Photo by Cris Knopf.

The Japanese poet Issa appears to have employed this telescoping approach in a famous haiku, by evoking the image of a mountain reflected in a dragonfly’s eye.

Interpretive Implications: Try switching back and forth between the small details, for instance the flowers of big bluestem, back to the big picture, perhaps noticing how prairies are havens of diversity, and back again. Telescoping is one way to scope out and develop potential themes. This technique also helps ensure that our interpretive efforts don’t become so immersed in details that we lose the big picture.

Like poets, we interpreters simultaneously delve into the processes of distillation and expansion. You give either a poet or an interpreter a peach, and both may attempt to share the hum of the whole orchard.

Poets use imagery not only to paint a picture but also to create effect.
Mrs. Shye, my seventh-grade teacher, took our class on an imaginary journey into the heart of a lemon. She invited us to close our eyes and imagine a lemon on the desk in front of us. She suggested we notice the shadows cast by the lemon, to feel its weight, to hold and roll it around in our hands. She encouraged us to notice the tiny pores and the knobby place left by the stem. She invited us to slice our lemon with an imaginary knife, to pick up and examine a lemon half, to notice the little translucent packages of juice and the white rind forming its wheel-like pattern, to smell and squeeze the lemon, to hear its juiciness. Soon, all of us were virtually bathing in this sensory-rich citrus experience. But that wasn’t all! Mrs. Shye ended our journey by asking us to take a big bite of that lemon! An audible gasp erupted from the class as we felt our faces contort and the saliva flow.

Pablo Neruda’s “Ode to a Lemon” invokes imagery to help us see this fruit as a cathedral. Photo by Vangelis Thomaidis.

Notice how Pablo Neruda leads us on a journey into the heart of the lemon through his use of imagery in a few lines from his poem “Ode to a Lemon.”

Cutting the Lemon
the knife
leaves a little
cathedral:
alcoves unguessed by the eye
that open acidulous glass
to the light of topazes
riding the droplets,
altars,
aromatic facades…

So, while the hand
holds the cut of the lemon,
half a world
on a trencher,
the gold of the universe
wells
to your touch.

Interpretive Implication: Learning to speak “imaginese,” poets and interpreters can evoke hidden worlds.

Although my first journey into the heart of the lemon was over 30 years ago, I never forgot the experience or what I learned about the power of imagery. Interpreters who effectively use imagery can help visitors experience the tangible world in new ways. Through imagery, we can offer our audiences experiences rich in mood and meaning and sometimes even transport them to other times and places.

Conclusion
Basho advised the poet writing of a pine tree to learn from the pine tree. When we interpreters go directly to the source of our wonder and inspiration we “fill the well from which we will draw.” When we allow our focus to switch from the small details to the bigger picture and back again, we create a footbridge across perception gaps. When we use language rich in imagery, we cultivate the possibility for illuminating encounters with the resources we cherish. The interpretive value of such a synthesized encounter is often greater than the sum of its parts. Both we and our visitors not only hear the music of prairie flowers but also of distant stars. Not only do we help our visitors forge emotional and intellectual bonds with our resource but we enable them to see the “trees” and the “forest.”

As interpreters, we share much in our labor with many fine poets and songwriters as we attempt to convey the passion we feel for the places we love. Kentucky poet Wendell Berry puts it beautifully in “Life’s a Miracle”:

I believe that this need for a whole, vital, particularizing language applies just as strongly to the sciences as to the arts and humanities. For the human necessity is not just to know, but also to cherish and protect the things that are known, and to know the things that can be known only by cherishing. If we are to protect the world’s multitude of places and creatures, then we must know them, not just conceptually but imaginatively as well. They must be pictured in the mind and in the memory: they must be known with affections, “by heart,” so that in seeing or remembering them the heart may be said to “sing,” to make a music peculiar to its recognition of each particular place or creature that it knows well.

***

Wren Smith is a poet and an interpretive programs manager for Bernheim Arboretum & Research Forest. Wren welcomes your insights and comments.