How does your garden grow?

garden rows

Growth in the nursery rhyme garden of Mary, Mary quite contrary needed 'cockleshells and silver bells and pretty maids lined up in a row'. You won't find that in the garden I discovered.

It was a pristine New England October day, perfect for meandering along Boston’s waterfront and through its neighborhood streets and byways. My wife and I seized the moment and started our walking journey in the Seaport area then headed to the North End. That’s where we locked our radar on the popular Freedom Trail. Like Dorothy and her Oz companions, we followed, followed, followed the brick road, albeit red bricks this time stopping at the Old North Church. 

In the courtyard just beyond Paul Revere's statue, I froze taking in the sight of the Memorial Garden. This was a garden of a very different sort, not one lush with flowers and greenery. But just as in Mary’s fabled garden there were rows of silver. The rows however were made up of hanging dog tags. A late afternoon sun bounced shafts of light off the polished tags making it hard to decipher names. But there were no names, the tags were nameless. The Old North Church Memorial Garden is dedicated to soldiers of our armed forces and the civilians who lost their lives in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Without inscribed names, perhaps each represented Everyman, or an Every Soldier. 

          More than five thousand Americans have died during combat since these wars were launched in 2001. If troops are reinserted to the region during the current campaign to destroy ISIS, human costs of waging war, as represented in this garden, as well as questions about overall U.S. strategy, will continue to grow.

That’s how this garden grows.

(Click to read David's previous blog posts)