the zen garden in druid hill park
This post is also linked from the Druid Hill Zen Garden entry on my Baltimore page in the digital garden. I am trying to weave the blog and the garden together a little better
I am new to the city, so I spend a lot of time studying maps - especially of the big parks, Druid and Leakin (the latter infamous from the first season of the Serial podcast) - for interesting sites. I saw a Zen garden, and without expecting much checked it out on a beautiful sunny spring late afternoon.
It's the "divine obsession" of one person, who transformed a pile of mis-carved and unused grave markers and other debris into a series of spaces for contemplation. It's a decidedly Western project, and has a homespun air to it like the Hostel in the Forest's labyrinth.
I found a post on Reddit from the gardener, who described the research into the grave markers and a bit about making the site:
Before explaining about the stones: I started working on the Zen Garden 4 years ago when it was just a pile of rocks and a whole lot of pricker bushes. It soon became my “divine obsession,” and I keep finding ways to enhance it! The whole story is too long to share here and now. Here’s the deal about the stones:
There are 2 dozen tomb stones in the Zen Garden. 80/20% Jewish/Christian, with 2 very old ones, lacking much detail.
As I began working on the Zen Garden I came to a dilemma. The grave stones bothered visitors, because one would think they were dumped there after building a housing development on top of a graveyard, or some such. (See movie Poltergeist.) My dilemma was, if that was true, I should leave them face up. But if they were mistakes, then I felt it was fine to flip them over.
I coordinated a research project with some genealogists who did most of the work. I just spreadsheeted names, dates, and took photos of the stones). I can now definitively say, they are mistakes. I’ve seen photos of the ALMOST (key word) identical stones, with a different middle initial, or a different spouse.
And after all that work, I was fortunate to meet with the X-head of Parks &n Rec. from a few decades ago. He explained that he used the space as a repository for potentially reusable materials, from buildings that had been torn down. He had hoped somehow these materials would be repurposed. There was no interest. At one time, there were piles of marble stoops, and a mile’s worth of granite curbing, 15’ high, in that acre or two of space!
Back to the tomb stones. There was a fellow with a business on Liberty Road that took tomb stone rejects, so to speak, and recut them, offering them cheaper than new. He went out of business, and the head of parks allowed him to dump them there. (This is decades ago).
Much of these materials are now buried under the ground of the ZG. (Every time I dig, I hit pipes, lead sheeting and all sorts of junk.) A large amount of debris was also taken and dumped/placed along the “shores” of the Jones Falls.
The marble stoops were purloined by a Baltimore sculptor that does phenomenal artwork with them.
I flipped almost all of the stones face down. But I liked the look of two old ones, and left them visible. One stone is clean white marble, with no etching. I incorporated it into the labyrinth (which BTW, I have dedicated to impermanence). There is a concrete footprint on one side of the stone, and another on the other.
May you find peace in the space.
The Zen Gardner
PS: When you come to visit, the bench has a pocket with a book under it where people write their thoughts, or poems, or sketches… Please feel free to add your thoughts. I’m on my 5th book! How nice. Enjoy!*
The garden in good shape, with a series of platforms for yoga or meditation and a trunk full of yoga mats and blocks. There are community shrines filled with odd little toys, beads, and crystals, and many of the trappings of very different Eastern contemplative traditions in one place - a torii gate, Himalayan peace flags, koinobori from Children's Day in Japan, a plaque with the Heart Sutra, and a labyrinth.
I used to look down at a kind of boomer Buddhism and its potentially problematic flattening of an idealized East - this would only be recognizable as a "Zen Garden" in America. With the ongoing Horror, I went into an American counter-culture more research phase about the 60s and 70s and now see people who were grasping at new ways of being from a homogeneous, consumer-driven post-war society and I can see myself in them. We're living through a time where the old ways aren't working, systems are breaking, and we are desperate for new things. Moving culture forward into something less shitty will be messy and problematic, too.
In many ways, it felt like stumbling onto someone's website, exploring the pages, and then signing a guestbook. I am grateful for the space.