Beginning this weekend the Kalamazoo Nature Center will feature an art exhibition that includes images from the Colony Farm Orchard. The show, entitled “Sacred Trees,” includes prints by Ladislav R. Hanka and paintings and photography by Sniedze Rungis and Zaiga Minka Thorson. The opening is Sunday 7 February 1-3 P.M.
Lad Hanka, a Kalamazoo artist with strong natural history interests, has been one of the leading proponents of the view that the Colony Farm Orchard should be maintained as open space. A 19 July 2009 email, sent by him to several local conservationists began, “A significant portion of the Asylum Lake Preserve is in imminent danger of destruction. The threat is real as I shall outline below…”
KNC is at 7000 N. Westnedge on the right side of the road. The show will be in the Glen Vista Gallery. Cross the bridge, veer right at the entry desk, and go south through through the natural history exhibits to the windows looking out into Cooper’s Glen.
The show will be up until March 26, 2010.
Here are a few lines from Lad Hanka’s introduction to the exhibit, “Drawing Sacred Trees at the Colony Farm Orchard.”
In this exhibition, it is the Colony Farm Orchard from whose embrace I have been spiriting out my images. That property is actually public land and protected by legislative deed restrictions, but that no longer means much. This place too has been fenced off and gated in order to usurp and eventually sell it off in parcels to private industrial developers. It sounds as far fetched as a bad spaghetti western, but it is unfortunately the truth.
I’ve been entering the orchard across the scar of Drake Rd., only recently still shaded by centennial bur oaks. With pencils in hand, I climb the fence, always fearing that I am just a step ahead of the bulldozers and the last to see it intact. I record the forms of the remaining bur oaks and the hollow, aging apple trees, each cleaving the heavens with its signature branchings – and know that I am transcribing a primal calligraphy – the notation of a poesy far older than the forebrain with which I describe it.
The Orchard is a rare place within the city – a place to be alone without having to drive. The apple trees I‘ve been observing here for these thirty years have grown only more remarkable as they’ve become individuated in their old age. Killing them and ravaging the earth that supported them is hardly an appropriate response. Drawing them is.
In reading your first chapter of Conservancy, I thought I should bring to your attention a very recent discovery regarding landscape architect Charles Eliot. I had the good fortune in 2006 to unearth in the Crane Estate attic of the Massac husetts Trustees of Reservations a scrapbook kept by Charles Eliot focused on the step-by-step process of developing the Trustees. It contained scores of news clippings as well of efforts throughout New England to save and develop opne space. This scrapbook had been donated by a relative and unknown to him and the Trustees was included in the gifted Charles W. Eliot II Papers on CWE II’s work with the Trustees. Please contact me for additional information on this exceptional discovery.
@ Ronald H. Epp
Thanks for the information. One of the things I’d have liked to know more about was what other land conservation efforts might have influenced Charles Eliot. Not a lot was going on either in the U.S. or elsewhere in the world, and his idea was a big step beyond anything else, but learning what was going on, based on his knowledge would be valuable. So, of course, would be his own view of the development of the Trustees, to supplement his father’s version.
Please do tell me more about the scapbook. Your link didn’t work for me, so please send more information via another comment. If something could be better transmitted through the mail, anything sent to me at Dept. of Biological Sciences, Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo MI 49008 would reach me.