A truly remarkable rare bird

Mary Ruthsdotter

By Alice Crawford,  October, 2005

On the occasion of Mary being honored by Assemblywoman Pat Wiggins’ at Women in the Wine Country. http://www.wiggins4senate.com/kickoff.html
(Photo is of Mary's front yard)

While my mother was visiting me in Australia a few weeks back, we spent a morning lazing around chatting and reading the Sydney Morning Herald.  I remember Mom reading aloud a bit of an article in which a woman was described as being a “truly remarkable rare bird.”  Mom said something to me about how fine she thought it would be to be described in that fashion and, since then, I’ve often thought of how the phrase fits her very well indeed:  “a truly remarkable rare bird.” 

It’s not easy to spell out exactly what makes this fit her so well, precisely because there is so much about my mother that is remarkable and rare.  In my mind, the mixture of exuberance and STICK TO-IT-iveness that she brings to her work in the garden has become a kind of shorthand for what I so admire in her approach to life.  My mother is always cultivating something – in fact, she is constantly cultivating many things at once.  With an abundance of creative energy, she starts more projects in a day than many of us do in a month, and -- even more impressively -- she has the patience and the persistence to see the majority of them through. 

To be truly remarkable, a garden needs an imaginative vision that sees more possibilities in a plot of land than a rose bush here and a privet hedge there – it needs inspiration and verve.  To thrive, however, a garden needs loads of fairly unglamourous day-to-day maintenance.  In my mother’s garden, she has brought these talents and abilities together – collaborating with others to bring something delightful into the world. 

I see this same dynamic in many of the projects she has turned her hand to.   Her work with the Women’s History Project is a source of enormous pride for me, but is only one of so many bits of beauty she has created:  from the first days I remember, she has been throwing pots, making quilts, cooking feasts, throwing parties, fixing up drab apartments which she has painted to look like (surprise!) gardens, filling a neighborhood with trees by day, and “guerilla pruning” them by night, nurturing a marriage of over 40 years, raising a happy and appreciative daughter who turned out to be a real, live feminist herself after all when the tussles over high-heels and lipgloss were put aside, and working in a wide variety of fashions to create community and a more equitable world.  When I think of my mother, I think of the deceptively simple Buddhist maxim to “let a thousand flowers bloom.”  This is exactly what she does every day, in large and small ways, and is part of what makes her a “truly remarkable rare bird” indeed.