Sherry Chandler

This ending statement for Voltaire’s Candide seems appropriate for this story from the Human Flower Project:

The best gardening story of the Spring comes from behind barbed wire, via Boston lawyer P. Sabin Willett.

Willet is working to defend prisoners the U.S. has locked up at Guantanamo, Cuba. These are the forgotten ones of the Iraq War. Some, like Willet’s client Saddiq Ahmad Turkistani, were cleared of any charges by the military “long ago” but remain in prison. These men are denied their freedom and even such bits of humanity as “newspapers, visits from loved ones, English dictionaries — and flowers.” Willet, who reported taking a bouquet to Saddiq recently, writes that the inmate “likes to draw roses and often asks for gardening magazines.”

Willet and others have also been trying to gain gardening privileges for the men at Camp Iguana, a low-security facility. The request was denied.

But, we learn, Saddiq and his fellow inmates have managed a tiny garden nonetheless. “We have some small plants — watermelon, peppers, garlic, cantaloupe. No fruit yet. There’s a lemon tree about two inches tall, though it’s not doing well,” Saddiq told his lawyer.

The inmates literally scratched out a plot in the hard soil of the prison yard. “At night we poured water on the ground. In the morning, we pounded it with the mop handle and scratched it,” with plastic spoons. “The next day, we did it again. And so on until we had a bed for planting…. We have lots of time, here.”

Seeds? They were saved from mealtimes when the prisoners were fortunate enough to find bits of fresh fruit on their dinner trays.

All things for the best in the best of all possible worlds?

You should read the rest of this post, which expands to talk a bit about a long tradition of POW gardens. Unfortunately, the prisoners at Guantanamo are more disappeared than POW.

Reprieve has undertaken a project to support the Guantánamo Gardeners with a packet of seeds. You can donate here.

A couple of revelations snuck in this morning when I wasn’t looking.

The locusts are in full bloom. Always a sweet time of year, the locust blooming. They smell sweet as lilacs and cover our driveway with their snowy fall.

My uncle, the one who featured in “Walking Taft Highway,” used to be renowned for his locust honey. I didn’t manage to get that in the poem. Perhaps another one, some day. Like Raven’s Shadow, I feel a need to record these things that will soon be lost.

That is another thing World War II took away from my uncle. While he was away, other family members watched over the bees. One got over-ambitious, wanted to expand, and bought in an infected hive. There were always a few hives around when I was growing up, but the honey business was never quite the same, and I don’t think I ever even saw the separator run. The place we called “the bee house” was just a sweet-smelling mystery to me.

And now honey bees are in trouble all over. We never see them on our place, though we used to have a wild bee tree on the back line fence. Bumble bees in plenty and what my Dad used to call “study bees” (they hold study in flight, like a humming bird), but no honey bees. If I could retire, I’d like to learn to mind a hive, just to have the bees. I don’t like honey.

And this Saturday is Kentucky Derby Day. It’s always this way with me and the Derby. Kentucky’s biggest annual event and I am oblivious until the day is upon us. I could be really clichéd I guess, and say I don’t march to the drum of hoofbeats. I’ve been far more interested in the fact that Seamus Heaney is coming to the University of Kentucky this weekend. He’ll read at the old King Library on Friday evening at an event honoring the Irish Nobel Laureates: Yeats, Shaw, Beckett and Heaney and receive an honorary degree and speak at commencement on Sunday.

Rumor has it that he’ll go the the Derby on Saturday, which is what made me realize that the Derby is on Saturday. Perhaps that’s what brought him to Kentucky in the first place. I am thrilled and impressed that Mr. Heaney is being so honored by U.K., but I don’t understand the connection. (Maybe he thought UK stood for United Kingdom?)

But mine is not to reason why. Mine is just to see if I can get an autograph on my copy of Mr. Heaney’s translation of Beowulf (Faber and Faber, 2002). If you remember Beowulf as something stodgy you had to read in English lit, take a look at this translation.

[Note: Well, we do have an Irish professor, Jonathan Allison, on faculty here who is director of the Yeats International Summer School at Sligo. ]