Sunken Gardens, Garfield Park -- Indianapolis, IN

Sunken Gardens, Garfield Park – Indianapolis, IN

French Impressionist painter Claude Monet said, “I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers.” And anyone who has ever seen any of Monet’s paintings knows that flowers are his pièce de résistance. In fact, flowers of all shapes, sizes, and colors fill his garden and home in France. Perhaps it’s true that beauty comes in the simplest forms.

This is what I thought about when I walked through the Sunken Gardens at Garfield Park on Indianapolis’ near south side. The gardens are open daily from 10am – 9pm through September 30. (Winter hours are 10am – 5pm.) It is located on the west side of the Garfield Conservatory and is free to the public.

The Sunken Gardens are nearing its centennial anniversary, marking its completion in 1916. It took two years for the planning and building of the gardens, with new greenhouses and the Conservatory becoming part of the park at the same time. Garfield Park, named after President James. A. Garfield, is Indianapolis’ oldest park which turns 137 years old this year. Not only is it beautiful to look at, it is “recognized as one of Indiana’s most significant works of landscape architecture” according to the pamphlet I picked up in the Conservatory.

Full of summer bloom, the place is alive with the colors of the season. I’m not a horticulturist or a gardener by any means. I can’t tell you the names of most flowers, or trees for that matter. My thumbs are definitely not green; more like brown, because that’s the color all my plants turn into. But I do respect their vast array of color, beauty, and simplicity, and I love to look at them from an artistic point of view. I love fresh cut lilacs or peonies in the spring. There’s nothing better than nature’s air freshener.

There’s something that happens when you walk through a garden like this. It takes you back to nature. For a moment, you escape the city, the noise, the busyness. Nineteenth-century England capitalized on this, often organizing trips to the country, made famous from such Romantic poets as Shelley, Keats, and Wordsworth. They believed it was good for the soul to reconnect with nature. And this reconnection with nature was one of the inspirations behind (American poet) Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass” among other poets and poems. Artists alike, besides Monet, have been inspired by nature since the inception of recreating it, from Rembrandt and Van Gogh to Georgia O’Keefe and Ansel Adams.

In fact, when the University of Indianapolis was known as Indiana Central University, they used to have a mandatory day where you had to travel to Brown County State Park (about 45 miles south of Indianapolis) just to enjoy the scenery. I don’t know if they still do that or not. We try to instill the need to be able to get back to nature, but there are many kids who live in the city who do not travel outside of it. I think the Indy Parks people are doing a good job at adding and maintaining parks and green areas throughout the city, and the adjacent Conservatory does have programs aimed for all ages to teach about plants, flowers and gardening, as well as promoting a clean environment.

I found this to be a wonderful place to sit, eat lunch, grab your book and enjoy an hour in peace and quiet and take in the scenery.

Free concert series -- Garfield Park, Indianapolis, IN

Free concert series – Garfield Park, Indianapolis, IN

July 1, 2010

One thing you should know about me is that I love free things: free food, free events, free stuff. So, I was ecstatic when I found a free concert series that runs every Thursday in July at Garfield Park’s MacAllister amphitheatre. Garfield Park, Indianapolis’ oldest park, is located on Indy’s southside on Shelby Street between Raymond Street and Southern Avenue. Tonight’s music was brought to us by the Greenwood Community Band. The weather was beautiful at 7pm when the music fired up.

Because of the July 4^th weekend coming up, most of the program was from the canon of classic American pieces and patriotic music. A couple of good ol’ marches got the people in the mood, followed by a medley of Civil War songs. I swore the song “Jesus Loves the Little Children” was in the medley. And actually, it was. The words were written by a preacher named Clare Herbert Walker, who lived during the Civil War, even though he would’ve only been five-years-old at the beginning of the war. But his words were later sung to the 1864 tune of “Tramp! Tramp! Tramp!”, written by George Fredrick Root. So, I wasn’t mistaken.

A medley of famed theatre composer George M. Cohen songs brought back a ton of memories for me, because during my freshman year in high school, we did a musical based on George M. Cohen songs. I even think I remember most of the lyrics. Mostly. They then played the song “Shenandoah” which I’ve played many times in piano lessons, band, and choir. They performed a nice arrangement; I wish I knew who did it.

A few folk songs are a must to be included. Then the famous “Colonel Bogey March,” made famous by a great movie called “Bridge Over the River Kwai.” I’m sure everyone has heard this song, but they probably have no idea where it comes from. Originally a book by Pierre Boulle (under the title “Le Pont de la Riviere Kwai”) was published in English in 1954, and the film was produced three years later. The famous bridge that Boulle wrote about doesn’t actually cross the River Kwai. He was mistaken and assumed that the “death railway” crossed the River Kwai, where in reality, it crossed the Mae Khlung.

As appropriate, they did the salute to the armed forces, playing each of the regiment songs from each of the branches of the military. I had my daughter stand up for the Army to represent my step-son who is active duty in Afghanistan, and my son stood for the Marine Corps, in honor of my husband, who was sitting at home finally getting to play Red Dead Redemption in peace.

At this time in the program, a choir comprised of men and women from various churches calling themselves the Festival Choir joined the band on stage for the remainder of the concert. They started out with Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America” (Berlin [born Israel Baline], originally wrote the piece in 1918 while serving in the US Army at Camp Upton in New York, but put it away because it didn’t fit a revue he was working on. Later, Woody Guthrie didn’t care for it, so he wrote a “This Land is My Land” as a response. This piece has also been proposed to become the national anthem.), followed by “America the Beautiful” (a poem originally written by Katharine Lee Bates and originally called Pikes Peak, later put to music by Samuel A. Ward who never saw the popularity of his most famous piece. It’s been proposed many times to replace the national anthem with this song.). Next came “Battle Hymn of the Republic” (an American abolitionist hymn written in 1861 by Julia Ward Howe. The tune was written around 1855 by William Steffe with two sets of different lyrics, and was originally a campfire devotional song.), and finally ending with John Phillip Sousa’s “Stars and Stripes Forever” (composed on a ferry in Europe on Christmas Day in 1896. Most Sousa bands adhere to the Sousa practice of using one or three piccolo players [never two] during the trio section. Congress designated this as the National March of the United States.) I had no idea that “Stars and Stripes Forever” had lyrics, but apparently it does, written by the composer himself. The official version is played by the United States Marine Band and is in the key of E-flat, which is a nice key to play in. I like E-flat.

It made for a very enjoyable evening, even though I spent the vast majority of the concert teaching my 4-year-old and a 1-year-old about bands, choirs and instruments, and eating cookies and finding dropped toys, and noticing the people walking dogs in the park and planes flying overhead, while the sun slowly edged behind the trees and the cymbals crashed.