A Shakespeare Garden - that’s for remembrance
| Stephen Long photo |
Good gentle folk, look here.
This latest acre of ours – so larded with
Sweet flowers, for memory’s sake ....
A bust of Will Shakespeare gazes unruffled from
beneath a stone wall onto one of Amherst’s great long views –
the sloping mowed meadow behind the Renaissance Center. The sculpture
stands in the Bernard Spivack Memorial Garden, named in memory of the
UMass English professor and Shakespearean, and donated by his family.
A Sept. 17 dedication brought together family members as well as about
forty others to celebrate the life of the scholar who died in 1992.
English Professor Charlotte Spivack, who, with her husband, arrived at UMass in 1964, still teaches many of the same courses he did – Shakespeare, Medieval, and Renaissance literature. The center, she has found, with its fine library and collection of recent journals, is a wonderful place to do research. Describing her husband, among other things, as “an enthusiastic and talented gardener,” she speaks warmly of this “beautiful natural spot.”
That natural beauty, like all things Shakespearean, also encompasses its own opposite. Stephen Gehlbach speaks of the garden as having, along with its fine view, a “mean northwest exposure.” Gehlbach, an epidemiologist whose formal title is dean of the School of Public Health and Health Sciences, helped create the garden by studying up on plants mentioned in Shakespeare’s plays. “It was a research challenge,” he says, partly because the old names are not necessarily what we associate with them now. Take pansies, for instance. Ours are a Victorian hybrid; Shakespeare’s were more like our Johnny-jump-ups.
The project’s other gardener is emeritus professor of French Dennis Porter, who put Gehlbach’s research into practice. With an amateur’s interest in landscape architecture and design, Porter has visited great gardens all over the world and has been “growing things” in his own garden for twenty-five years. He faced the problem of how to make a proper Shakespearean garden in an area whose climatic conditions are so different from the mild ones of central and southern England. Some compromises were necessary. They had to find a tougher variety of boxwood to use for the garden’s dividers. They chose sturdy herbs – rue and lavender – along with simple, single-bloom roses, rosa gallica, in white and red. “York and Lancaster,” says Porter.
The garden is only the latest in director Arthur Kinney’s series of projects for the Renaissance Center, officially known as the Massachusetts Center for Renaissance Studies. And the making of the garden exemplifies Kinney’s skills as a “charming arm-twister,” in Gehlbach’s words. Kinney has a genius for finding people whose interests – curricular or extracurricular – will fill the gaps in his plans. He has harnessed those interests to raise funds, to gather and house a fine research library, to staff the center with both professional and volunteer workers, to set up a facility that offers programs for academic researchers and community members alike. Does he ever sleep? The prodigiously energetic Kinney, Copeland Professor of Literary History and a co-founder of the journal English Literary Renaissance, replies, “I don’t sleep. I dream.”
Others seem to respond readily to those dreams. Stanley Koehler, poet and emeritus professor of English, chose and rearranged the Shakespeare lines quoted above, part of an anthology he read at the garden’s dedication: “Arthur said, ‘We’d like a poem,’ and so of course I did one,” says Koehler.
— Marietta Pritchard
