Doug Norris
Flotsam & Jetsam
(Published: March 4, 2010 in the South County Independent – North-East Independent)
On a spring-like day in Providence, as the trace snow on the street blackened with the grit and grime of city bustle, the woods of Rhode Island beckoned beyond the escalators and the pastry
vendors at the R.I. Convention Center.
In the middle of the room was a piece of wild South County, an undulating circle woodlands, where gray and red squirrels scampered up bark, a mink eyed a
clutch of duck eggs, and the pines, birches and beech provided a home for saw-whet owls, raccoons and downy woodpeckers. People moved clockwise through the pocket wilderness, pausing to smell the skunk
cabbage and the cinnamon fern, stomping over pine needles, listening to songbirds overhead, and rubbing the bark of 20-foot white pines and a lone, leafless sweet birch standing in the middle of the path.
"Go on," said Judy Ireland. "Hug it."
For the 17th year in a row, Ireland, 72, of North Kingstown, designed the Exeter-based R.I. Wild Plant Society exhibition at the R.I. Spring
Flower and Garden Show, held last month. She was especially proud of the sweet birch and the ingenuity of her team of volunteers who installed it, since it was solid as a rock, despite the fact that its
roots weren't established in concrete. The job involved a four-foot plate of steel, flanges, bolts and a minor degree in mechanical engineering, but Ireland said that deconstructing the technical marvel was
less important than the effect of its illusion.
"Yesterday when I talked with the press, I got so involved explaining how we stood the sweet birch up, I forgot the big picture," she said. "Where
would we be in New England without our trees?"
Anyone who has ever flown into Rhode Island, taking that looping descent over the bay, is stunned by the view below, a seemingly endless dance of
trees and water, one that seems incongruous for the country's second-most densely populated state. Branching off from the flower show's theme of "Nature's Timeless Garden," Ireland and her team crafted an
exhibition that explored how "the timeless cycle of life is played out in trees."
"We want people to walk under the trees and touch the trees," Ireland said. "We're trying to capture not only
the feeling under your feet but that sense of stepping in the woods and looking up and the feeling of being small in the forest, knowing that you're a part of something so much bigger than you."
Like the concentric rings on a tree stump, the exhibition could be explored as a series of circles. Walking along the outer ring in the negative space of the convention center, the visitor encountered a
time-lapse digital photo sequence of Rhode Island trees and forest scenes, flashlights and magnifying glasses for exploring deeper, and an abstract sculpture revealing the variety of things that trees
produce and provide. There were newspapers and books, birdhouses and wooden spoons, chopsticks, paintbrushes, clothing pins and wooden spoons, along with reminders about shade, oxygen, windbreak, shelter and
lumber.
On the outer edge of the inner ring were forest scenes of snags and rotting logs, a calendar of Rhode Island's champion trees, children's books celebrating the lives of trees, a water
feature, educational illustrations drawn by Charlestown's Francis Topping and a series of ankle-high quotes.
Thomas Fuller: "He that plants a tree loves others beside himself."
Aldo Leopold: "Acts of creation are ordinarily reserved for gods and poets. To plant a pine, one need only own a shovel."
Nelson Henderson: "The true meaning of life is to plant trees under whose shade you do not expect to sit."
The garden of circles culminated in a bull's eye, an inner ring showing the cycle of a tree's life.
"What's one tree in Rhode Island that everybody knows," Ireland asked. "The eastern white
pine. It's the ultimate tree, here. The original settlers saw a forest full of these pines and used them to make everything, including the king's ships."
The micro-environment moved full circle
from seed to sprout to sapling to young growth to mature pine. Or, as Ireland put it: "The big tree falls and the log rots and the pine cone drops and the seed falls into the rotting log and germinates and
starts the whole cycle again."
Amid a setting of logs and boulders, leaf matter and tangled branches, the exhibition told a story of life, death and resurrection, nature's way. A thick Rhode
Island accent could be detected in the telling. The large trees were cut from a property in South County with the owner's permission. Familiar scenes of Christmas fern mosses and seeps coming out of ledges
are part of the Rhode Island archetype. There's river birch, eastern redbud, shadbush, mountain laurel. Rhode Island mosses, ferns and club mosses, some of which have been present in our landscape for 300
and 400 million years, offset the tree timeline, emphasizing the theme.
"We tell the other stories, too," Ireland said. "Photosynthesis. History. Habitat. Even recycling, the idea that Mother
Nature's been doing this long before we started."
Seventeen years ago, Ireland designed a little garden replication using an original bridge from the University of Rhode Island's W. Alton Jones
Campus, a scene that mimicked a piece of West Greenwich.
"We came up with the idea to bring the woods inside," Ireland said. "Nobody had ever done that at a flower show before."
It's what continues to make Rhode Island's spring flower show unique from others around the country.
"People here love to have the woods in the show," she said. "It gives it a dimension that it
otherwise wouldn't have. And for me, this is what I love, being in the woods. When I want to be somewhere, this is where I go."
She grew up in the woods of Maine, the daughter of nature-lovers, who has never lost her zest for the wild.
"I have a picture of me taken before I could walk sitting in the woods with all of
these big ferns around me," said Ireland, her eyes sparkling at the memory. "I just turned 72, and I still love playing in the dirt. I will do it until I die."
Cycles and circles, seasons and
senses, spinning around infinity, the universe expanding in a pinecone. As Ireland talked, exiting the woods she helped to build, a little boy nearby tugged at his mother's blouse, trying to get her
attention. "Mommy," he repeated, "can we go hug the tree now?"
