Cynthia Jordan wrote the following article for the December 2007-January 2008 issue of our publication Gardening on the Edge welcoming the then new Class of 2008. It gives you good insight into this Master Gardener organization and the kinds of people who join...
Making Connections...Staying Connected
—Cynthia Jordan, previous President, MG94
Here’s a story about a tea party that took place at my house last Sunday as a result of Anne Hayden, MG’95, collecting raffle items for this year’s Masters Garden Tour. The title of this tidbit will make sense to you after reading this….
Every year Anne calls me and asks for raffle items for the tour. She’s volunteered for this task for as long as I can remember. This year I talked some friends into being a “wife/husband raffle item”. The item was a tea party, complete with lecture and finger sandwiches, for the winner and five friends. Annaliese and Mike Keller are well-known to Santa Cruz County shoppers as the “tea and chai people” at the Cabrillo Farmers Market. They own Malabar Trading Company and they are experts on the subject of tea, its history, harvest, preparation, and marketing elements.
On the day of the Masters Tour, Anne set-up her raffle display at the Homeless Garden Project site in Santa Cruz. Along comes 85-year-old Muriel Salmansohn, who buys a raffle ticket for the tea party. She wins. She calls me. We schedule the date/time. On Sunday Muriel and her friends show up at my house for tea. Mike and Annaliese are ready with their lecture. Teapots filled with exotic teas from around the world are brewing in the kitchen. Anne made dozens of incredible finger sandwiches. Add some scones, fruit and brownies and we had ourselves a tea party. As Muriel put it, “This is the best party I’ve had since I was 11 years old.” By the way… Muriel is blind and has been a volunteer at the Homeless Garden Project for over 10 years.
Anne and Annaliese had never met each other before. None of us had met Muriel or her friends. Or so we thought. Three hours later, we learn that Anne and Annaliese have many mutual close friends as a result of their culinary backgrounds. Two of the guests are librarians and we’ve all probably talked to them at one time or another. Another guest is the literary assistant to a dear friend of mine who has amassed one of the largest private diary-libraries in the country. His wife, also a friend, is a world-class ceramist. Her work was selected by the Clinton White House to be presented to visiting heads of state. Others at the table knew of her and had purchased her work.
Most fascinating was Muriel’s story of her father escaping the anti-Semitism of Russia in the early 1900’s; his trip on a freighter to NY and the journey through Ellis Island; his first night in America, sleeping in a doorway in Brooklyn. We were enthralled with recollections of her childhood. And now we were all connected to her and her father and Mother Russia as a result of hearing her story that day.
What were the chances that ten people would find themselves so entwined and connected by a dollar raffle ticket?? We discovered that the six degrees of separation were now reduced to two.
So what does this tea party have to do with the MG Newsletter Staff’s request that I write an article about being elected the new President of the MBMG Board of Directors? I have been a Master Gardener since 1994. I did my training and graduated from the Santa Clara County MG Program. I was part of the founding team that planned and implemented the MG program for Monterey Bay. I served as president, co-president, VP and general-purpose Board member for the first eight years of the program.
Throughout these last 13 years, I have remained connected to the MG program and the scores of master gardener friends I have made along the way. This connection has had a profound impact on my entire life – not just my gardening life.
For those of you enrolling in the 2008 class, your life will change forever with the connections you are about to make. As gardeners, we don’t have to be told that gardening is heaven on earth and gardeners are special. By virtue of planting and harvesting and watering and weeding, we are somehow connected to the cycles of life much more deeply than people who don’t garden. But the MG program will extend and expand that connection to human beings, to “like spirits” who are connected to Mother Earth the way you are.
Beyond the connection to other gardeners, the MG program is unique in that it connects you to a larger entity called “community”. This is not your grandma’s garden club. The MG program insists that your mind, body and spirit connect, one with the other, and with the community around you. And that community is no longer defined by your zip code. Globalization and global warming have connected you to the entire planet. You become a better gardener not because you learn to garden better but because you are now connected on a deeper level to the people in your ever-expanding community.
The MG certification process requires that you remain connected to the program by completing community service projects and continuing your education year after year. You will not find this to be a hardship. You are going to make friends that you will have the rest of your life. You will want to hang out with these newfound friends. Whether you stay connected to them via community projects or the quarterly meetings, they spill over into other parts of your life. The connections you are about to make are ones that you will want to keep, even when your gardening days are spent!
In my “real life”, I work in the computer industry. For the last ten years, my companies have developed software products that network people and data. Network is another term for connect. Data is another word for knowledge. I absolutely enjoy watching people get connected with other people and acquiring new knowledge along the way. That itself is another description of the MG program: people and knowledge connecting for a better world.
2008 brings a new class of recruits to the MG program. We’ve just seated a new Board of Directors. Lots of “new” will be happening in the coming year. To ensure that the legacy of the MG program is sustained, we need the tribal knowledge of all the MGs who have come before this new class. If you’ve disconnected from the MG program over the years, please consider reconnecting. Show up at an advanced training class and surprise us. Sit in on a quarterly meeting and catch up on things. Write an article about your favorite gardening experience for the newsletter. You don’t have to get wrapped up in the red tape of certification if you don’t want to. We’ll take whatever time you can give.
To the Master Gardener Program and to Master Gardeners past, present, and to come…stay connected!
Postscript: Muriel leaves for Florida in two weeks. She can no longer live by herself so she’s going to live near her children. But I know that the tea-party-goers will all stay spiritually connected… all because Anne Hayden, MG’95, collected raffle items for an MG event.
