Grave Gardeners, At The Woodlands

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN !!!!!:

The application period for 2017 Grave Gardeners has closed. We are reviewing applications and will send notice of final decisions on Wednesday, January 25th. 

Who are The Woodlands Grave Gardeners? 
The Grave Gardeners are a group of volunteers who are each assigned a cradle grave to adopt at The Woodlands. These graves were originally designed to be planters, and would have been planted by loved ones in the Victorian era. Our Grave Gardeners tend to their assigned cradle grave throughout the entire growing season (March-October). 

Photo credit: Julie Steiner

What will the Grave Gardeners be planting? 
All gardens will be designed (by you!) with the Victorian Garden aesthetic in mind. These are ornamental gardens, not vegetable gardens. An approved planting list has been created by The Woodlands to help guide the gardeners. Workshops held in February and March will give gardeners a knowledge base to work from, and The Woodlands will provide all necessary supplies and knowledge to you. Work days and events will be held throughout the growing season to help keep your grave gardens looking good. 
How do you become a Grave Gardener?
The application period for this season is open from January 5th until January 20th. If interested, please fill out the application below. Want to try it but are new to ornamental gardening? Thats okay! All levels are welcome.

What kind of time commitment is expected? 
Our 2016 Grave Gardeners that had the most success dedicated 2-4 hours a week caring for their garden.

What kind of challenges can be expected?
Dealing with pests, groundhogs munching on your plants, and drought are a few challenges our gardeners had last year.

Words of advice from our 2016 Grave Gardeners:
        "Don't be daunted if you're not a gardener. There is plenty of support and it's about progress, not perfection!"
        "Make sure you have the time! I was in love with the idea, but between my work and school schedule, it was a lot harder to get over to the                    Woodlands than I thought it would be. "
        "There are some fantastic gardeners who participate. Get to know your fellow grave gardeners."

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Can't commit to becoming a Grave Gardener, but still want to be part of the program? Consider making a donation directly to the Grave Gardeners to ensure this program can continue for years to come.

Elizabeth Gilbert "The Signature of All Things" ("Eat, Pray, Love")

Philadelphia Inquirer, Friday, September 27, 2013, Home & Design section, Page D1:




Earthy pleasures in Gilbert's new novel


Elizabeth Gilbert's new book, "The Signature of All Things," is her first novel in 13 years. It's due out Tuesday. (DAVID SWANSON / Staff Photographer)
 GALLERY: Earthy pleasures in Gilbert's new novel



VIRGINIA A. SMITH, INQUIRER STAFF WRITER
POSTED: Friday, September 27, 2013, 2:02 AM


The Woodlands, the once-grand 18th-century estate on the west bank of the Schuylkill, is one of Philadelphia's lesser-known historic spots.

Yet, novelist Elizabeth Gilbert found her way to 40th Street and Woodland Avenue and chose the run-down mansion, carriage house, and stables, and the surrounding Victorian-era cemetery, as the setting for her new book, The Signature of All Things.

"It was so obvious as soon as we drove up. That's it! Everything about the Woodlands was right," says Gilbert, forever to be remembered for what she calls "the freakishly successful" Eat, Pray, Love. Her 2006 memoir has sold more than 10 million copies worldwide and was made into a 2010 movie starring Julia Roberts.

Gilbert's latest work, due out Tuesday from Viking, is her first novel in 13 years. Be forewarned: Signature is no Eat, Pray, Love, which was well-padded with humor, wish-fulfillment, and garlicky bucatini all'amatriciana. But, Gilbert says, "I think readers will recognize my themes: travel, exploration, curiosity, mysticism, adventure, and what is a woman's life."


Signature is a deeply researched, historical tale that unfolds from 1760 to 1880 - "the most fascinating moment in botanical history," she calls it - in Philadelphia, the nation's horticultural hot spot, and points beyond, including Amsterdam, Hawaii, Peru, London, and Tahiti.

Equally vast is the emotional landscape of the fictional Whittakers, a collection of memorable, if not especially likable, characters who live at White Acre (a play on the family name). The Woodlands, where a restoration plan is in the works, snagged the role over Bartram's Garden, which Gilbert found too Quakerly and modest, and Lemon Hill mansion, which "didn't feel right."

In real life, the Federal-style Woodlands, built in 1788, was the country home of William Hamilton, a gentleman intensely interested in architecture, landscape design, and botany. He traded seeds with Thomas Jefferson, another talented plantsman, and William Bartram, son of John, the noted Philadelphia botanist.

Presiding over the fictional White Acre, Philadelphia's grandest estate, is patriarch Henry Whittaker, a crude, self-made adventurer whose world revolves around botanical exploration and the accumulation of money, by whatever means. Daughter Alma, Gilbert's protagonist, lives a rarefied and repressed existence until age 50, when her narrative spikes in surprising directions.

More than 6 feet tall and solidly built, Alma is described as "a big homely pine cone." She's a botanist with a moss obsession, able to hold her own in esoteric debate with the scholars and adventurers - men, all - who flock to the Whittaker dinner table.

But Alma is lonely, aching with lust, and the solitary manner in which she alleviates this predicament is among the more arresting features of Gilbert's book. Relief comes in a tiny, dark room off the Whittaker library called "the binding room," where Alma ostensibly retreats to care for the family's fragile book collection.

Gilbert, 44, modeled this hideaway after a closet on the Woodlands' first floor. And she wanted Alma, she says, to be "very carnal, because women's desire has just not been written about from that time.

"You know they had that desire . . . . It's not like we just invented it in the 20th century."

Alma's dowdiness also serves as counterpoint to modern heroines, often portrayed as "dangerously gorgeous with flashing eyes, heaving bosoms, and auburn hair," Gilbert says. "All sorts of women feel desire, even homely women who don't incite desire in others."

Signature is quite a page-turner, in other words, with lots of pages to turn (499).

Gilbert drew inspiration from a 1784 illustrated edition of Captain James Cook's voyages, Cook's Journeys, which belonged to her great-grandfather, a Philadelphia lawyer. (Henry Whittaker joins Cook on a botanical expedition to Tahiti and Hawaii.)

Gilbert, who grew up on a Christmas tree farm in northwest Connecticut, tapped another strand of DNA for her novel - from her mother, a master gardener who grew all the family's vegetables.

"When I grew up, I ran away from the soil as fast as I could, moved to New York, Philadelphia, traveled the world," Gilbert recalls. "But once I moved to Frenchtown [N.J.], all I wanted to do was garden."

Gilbert lived for a time in West Philadelphia and upper Roxborough and still has family in the area. In 2009, she settled in Frenchtown, a picturesque borough on the Delaware River, with husband Jose Nunes, known to readers of Eat, Pray, Love as Filipe.

At her new home, Gilbert planted vegetables, like her mother, but soon abandoned that for a sprawling flower garden and native plant meadow, which she calls "my bird and butterfly disco."

The gardens "never fail to delight me," she says. They also fueled the botanical fascination that led to Signature.

Another writerly influence was Gilbert's desire to avoid "the standard two endings that every novel about women in history has had, until very recently."

She describes them this way: "You either got the happy ending, meaning you had a good marriage to landed gentry and you settled down in the fine estate and had a bunch of children - or you had the unhappy ending. You made a sensual error and you're ruined, bankrupt, impoverished, or killed by yourself or somebody else.

"There aren't just two possible endings. Most of us survive all kinds of mistakes and can look back and say, 'That was a really interesting life.' "

Gilbert is eager to help raise money for the Woodlands, which recently got a $300,000 grant from the William Penn Foundation to devise a master plan for restoration. An author event of some kind - tea and a tour of Woodlands-inspired scenes from the book, perhaps - is planned for the spring.

The tour could include the infamous first-floor "binding room," the housekeeper's bedroom (underground passageway), Alma's studio (stable), and the grounds, where Alma collected her moss specimens.

Already, a few first-time visitors have discovered the Woodlands, having heard of its influence on Gilbert.

"We really hope to use the book to help elevate the Woodlands' profile," says executive director Jessica Baumert.

Meanwhile, Gilbert contemplates her next move: "a very naughty novel."



'SIGNATURE' EVENT

Elizabeth Gilbert

will speak at the Free Library of Philadelphia, 1901 Vine St., on

Oct. 3 at 7:30 p.m. Tickets are $15.

Gilbert will autograph copies

of her new book,

The Signature

of All Things.

For information,

go to freelibrary.org/calendar or call 215-567-4341.

vsmith@phillynews.com.


215-854-5720


Virginia A. Smith
Inquirer Staff Writer
Articles | Email

Read more at http://www.philly.com/philly/home/20130927_Earthy_pleasures_in_Gilbert_s_new_novel.html#qH3UDyGTezFzyRsT.99

Are You A Doer?! Walk Through Historic Woodlands (Cemetery) In Philadelphia

Actions speak louder than words.  This is a great sentiment:  DO, NOW.  Get things done:

Seeking refuge, finding perspective

At the Woodlands, among the dead, are Philadelphians famous and not, who cared about the consequential, got things done.

January 28, 2013|By Beth Kephart

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The Woodlands Mansion, former home of William Hamilton. This Federal-style home sits… (BETH KEPHART )

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When did we become what we, on our worst days, seem to be? This nation trampled by poor compromise and misplaced screech, this drowning swell of hyper-caffeinated opinion, this landscape of the random and the ruined. We are increasingly disinclined toward rational debate. We rage about the inconsequential. We want to be heard, but we don't want to listen. We're quick to deplore the mess we're in, and tragically ill-equipped to fix it.

Impotence has never been my thing. I believe in the kids I teach, the small heroics of neighbors, quantum generosity, anonymous kindness, in doing something, making something, being something. I believe in the idea of what lies ahead, what takes us forward. We are. We can.

But when the noise of now reverbs more insistently than my faith in percolated possibilities, I head west, past the University of Pennsylvania campus, across the trolley tracks, through the eternal stone gatehouses, and into the leafy atmosphere of the Woodlands. This was a 600-acre estate at the height of its glory. It was home to a man, William Hamilton, who, in the late 18th and early 19th century, trafficked in botany and beauty, befriended Thomas Jefferson, planted and tended the harvested seeds of Lewis and Clark, threw a picnic party on his own front lawn for 17,000, and gave America the ginkgo, the Lombardy poplar, and the Norway maple. A man who would stand high on the hill, taking pleasure from the river running at his feet, the terrestrial mathematics of rocks, the gardens filibustering across the way, at Grays Ferry. Hamilton was interested in Nature's boundless capacity. He reveled in it, invested in it. On the oasis of his estate, he worked to preserve it.

Today, the Woodlands is a 45-acre National Historic Landmark, a garden cemetery in an urban place, an irregular geometry of swales and stones. I rarely see another soul when I arrive, early afternoons, some Tuesdays in spring. I silence my phone. I walk down the paths and off the paths, among Victorian funerary and planted flags, wreaths left over from another season, names I do not know, dates both recent and ancient. I teach memoir at Penn - the shaping and discovery of life stories. I teach, I hope, something about meaning. At the Woodlands, among the dead, before Tuesday class, I walk among those who radically embraced the ricochet of possibility and dreams, who rose above the cacophony.

You'll need a map to find the famous ones. The artists Thomas Eakins and Rembrandt Peale. The sculptor William Rush. The illustrator Jessie Wilcox Smith. The banker, philanthropist, town builder, and newspaper backer Anthony J. Drexel. The abolitionist Mary Grew. The poet-physician Silas Weir Mitchell. The Rittenhouse Square architect Wilson Eyre Jr. The Philadelphia surgeon Samuel David Gross. The honorary deputy chair of the Philadelphia Fire Department John Chalmers Da Costa, M.D. The revolutionizing nurse Alice Fisher. The locomotive magnate Andrew McCalla Eastwick (who rescued Bartram's garden from sure destruction). And Paul Philippe Cret himself, whose architectural sensibilities infiltrated, among other things, the Benjamin Franklin Bridge, the Rodin Museum, and the eternal gates of the Woodlands.

They're all here, among the politicians and Civil War heroes, the inventors and businessmen, the founders of universities and the students. Men and women who cared about the consequential, who got things done. I meander among them, ahead of class on Tuesdays. I watch the birds on the trees. I make my way toward the southeast promontory that still looks down on the broad belly of the Schuylkill, though there are corroded rail lines now, and there is industrial char, there are the landscapes we have ruined and the landscapes that only the most persevering among us will finally redeem.

Who are you? I will ask my students after I have wound my way past the massive mausoleums and the humble sky-facing stones, past the gates. After I have headed back over the trolley tracks and turned, my chin tucked against the wind, toward the Victorian manse, where I teach. Gridlock, gunfire, impasse, pain, and yet: Who might you be?

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Beth Kephart is the author of 14 books, including "Flow: The Life and Times of Philadelphia's Schuylkill River" (Temple University Press). Her "Handling the Truth," a book about the making of memoir, is due out later this year from Gotham. She blogs daily at www.beth-kephart.blogspot.com.

Philadelphia Inquirer, Sunday January 27 2013, Currents, Page D1