Winter Celebration in the Garden
Green Gulch Farm Arbor Day 2010

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On February 7, 2010, Green Gulch Farm Zen Center celebrated its 32^nd annual Arbor Day. In the early years of Green Gulch we dedicated a solid month every winter to the planting of 1,000 each of seedling pine, redwood and fir trees on the hills above the Gulch. The Zen Center carpentry crew did the forest planting in those early days. Because they were milling wood on-site to build the guest house and conference hall at Green Gulch, the carpenters were dedicated to reforestation in the watershed. Since those early years we have consolidated our public Arbor Day planting into one ceremonial celebratory weekend a year including a Saturday daylong watershed walk and a half-day tree planting celebration on the following Sunday afternoon. Every month GGF also hosts watershed work afternoons well attended by Bay Area ecologists and friends.

This year’s Arbor Day festivities began with the ceremonial planting of a young seedling Coast Live Oak in the central core of the Green Gulch campus, a delightful event primarily led by startlingly focused children and willing helpers. Then the assembly of some 50 residents and guests fanned out across the coastal hills to plant young oaks, native grasses and a variety of riparian shrubs as well as five new fruit trees and a healthy passel of Coast Redwood seedlings.

Planning for an Arbor Day event takes coordinated effort and dedicated attention. Currently at Green Gulch Farm our environmental coordinator and outreach genie, Sukey Parmelee, organizes Arbor Day and the monthly watershed plantings. Sukey grows or purchases the seedling native plants that will be set out, works with a crew to fashion protective root and top cages for the wildland plantings, and makes sure that the planting sites are well prepared for this public day. In addition she checks and maintains the plantings during the growing season to ensure their health and well being.

This year at the close of Arbor Day the assembly gathered in the Zen Center dining room to celebrate our day of environmental action by lifting cups of steaming hot tea steeped from bright green Douglas Fir tips. Arbor Day coincided with Super Bowl Sunday this year, which explains the spliced energy of Saintly virtue and Coltish vigor so visceral in the room as the different work teams touched down and reported to one anther about their planting. Then, in the last light of the day, a small group of us followed the thin course of the Green Gulch Creek down through the farm fields and out to the ocean, paying tribute to the grasses and trees of the watershed and celebrating the restoration work that is unfolding about a mile away at Muir Beach.

Walking home in the dark, boots heavy with hillside mud and hands sticky with resinous tree sap, I remembered a few stanzas of sylvan tribute originally composed in November of 1989 by His Holiness the Dalai Lama:

They say, in the celestial realms,
The trees emanate
The Buddha’s blessings
And echo the source
Of basic Buddhist doctrines
Like impermanence....

Being attentive to the nature
Of interdependence of all creatures
Both animate and inanimate
We never slack in our efforts
To preserve and conserve the harmony of nature.

On a certain day, month, and year,
We should observe the ceremony
Of tree planting.
Thus, we fulfill our responsibilities,
And serve fellow beings,
Which not only brings happiness,
But benefits all....

May sylvan joy and pristine happiness
Ever increase, spreading and encompassing all that is!

For more information see:

• A Buddhist Response to the Climate Emergency, ed. John Stanley, David R. Loy and Gyurme Dorje, Wisdom Publications (Boston, 2009). www.wisdompubs.org

• The United Nations Environmental Programme: Billion Tree Campaign, www.unep.org/billiontreescampaign