On a day that I thought I should stay in bed — dragged down temporarily by a cough that came hand in hand with the fecund delights of spring — I went instead with Mary on a bus trip to the New York Botanical Garden, returning, if not cured, enlivened by what I’d seen.
Roberto Burle Marx, a Brazilian artist who throughout his life danced with the plants of the Amazon and advocated for them, energizes one, as does the Botanical Garden itself, a 250-acre peaceable kingdom that I never knew existed in the Bronx. The trees alone are worth the trip.
Burle Marx was entwined with nature, as, I think Neruda, who grew up in southern Chile, was also. Our guide, Alexandra Brody, a native of Venezuela, said they’d been friends, which didn’t surprise me inasmuch as they were passionate celebrants and champions of life, of beauty, rooted as they were in nature and in its infinite variety.
To go there, to the “Living Art of Roberto Burle Marx” exhibit, which continues through September, is to be reminded that it is unnatural not to be with nature, and of it, and that the further we divorce ourselves from it the more suicidal it is, for ourselves, and for society. We have come a long way away, and perhaps it is too late, unless we return wholeheartedly to what is generative and beautiful rather than always accede to what’s banal. We can do better, we can be like the plants, intertwine and give forth, as the Amazon does, as we saw at the New York Botanical Garden the other day.
If you’ve given up, or are close to giving in to the perversities of humankind, writ large in international politics, go to the Botanical Garden, where you will see what is and what could be.