THE GENIUS OF THE PLACE: POETRY, PALM TREES, AND THE MYSTERY OF MERWIN - Shan Overton

“On the last day of the world / I would want to plant a tree.” – W.S. Merwin

Last March, the New York Times published an opinion piece entitled “The Poet Who Planted Trees.” The photograph at the top of the screen featured a vibrant, wide-eyed, white-haired W.S. Merwin wearing a blue linen shirt with a band collar and a pair of belted blue jeans. The poet gazed upwards into a grove of vibrant greens – all of them palm trees and cycads that he and his wife Paula had planted over forty years. The author of the Times article, a geobiologist named A. Hope Jahren, reflected on having met Merwin in his palm grove some years before his death in 2019. She acknowledged the poet’s great gift to the rest of us and to the earth: “Mr. Merwin wrote leaves of poetry, but he also grew real trees, thousands of them, creating beauty out of thin air and fostering life beyond his own. Even in paradise, no one lives forever, but both Mr. Merwin’s poems and his palms will outlive us all.” Certainly, his poems and palms have outlived him, and they are likely to outlive the rest of us, too. 

But what do these lifeways of a poet and planter of palms offer as a legacy to us and those who will follow us? Merwin’s lengthy and storied career as an award-winning translator and poet aligned with his long-term, unflagging dedication to growing a lush garden on land that had been destroyed by previous human agricultural uses. He seemed to know that poems and palms were of a piece: an inner impulse called on him to write lines of verse on scraps of paper each day while tending trees and plants for four decades. What was this mysterious inclination beyond the obvious intellectual curiosities? How did he experience his writing in relation to his work to reclaim degraded pineapple plantation land? How did Merwin’s writing and gardening tap into what the earlier poet Alexander Pope called “the Genius of the Place”? Most simply put: What do palm trees have to do with poetry?

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I began to dig into the soil beneath these questions in search of this Genius while in St. Petersburg, Florida, this past December. Late one morning, I found myself wandering amidst a palm and cycad arboretum along the North Shore Park on the Tampa Bay. I did not fully appreciate what I was entering as I turned into an arboretum off a wide promenade bustling with cyclists, runners, dog walkers, and rollerbladers. Once tucked into the shimmering green leaves, I was struck by the quiet. Where just feet away I had heard radio music, animated conversations, waves hitting the shore, and birds calling out, the interior of the arboretum was nearly as tranquil as a deep velvet forest. I lingered amongst the plants for a good, long while, reading nameplates and examining the shapes and colors of five hundred palms’ and cycads’ leaves. I marveled at the diversity of the plants that make this place home. 

As I explored the garden, I felt my whole body shift into a lower gear. A subtle but powerful sensation of tranquility took over. My mind cleared as I breathed the fresh air and fell headlong into an ocean of green in shades of jade and avocado, emerald and olive, and even a bright seafoam color. I thought about Merwin moving amongst his cycads and palms and suddenly recognized that this kind of lucidity and freshness was what he knew. He lived in a space he created; it was made through a reciprocity between the activities of planting palms and writing poetry. The palms make a sanctuary of stillness, a safe space that allows a person’s thoughts to slow down and deepen, all at once. The palms focus the attention, even when their leaves swish and sway in the breeze. I could have stayed in that sanctuary all day, perhaps even written a few poetic lines like the master, Merwin. 

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Later on, I remembered time spent amongst palms and cycads in Amsterdam nearly ten years ago. I was in the city on an extended layover after visiting Rwanda to study the nation’s efforts to heal after the 1994 genocide. It had been a weighty, disturbing trip of listening to immensely difficult stories, witnessing the bones of the dead, being present for reconciliation rituals, and hearing the whispers of hope for the future. Colleagues and I stopped over in this busy European city on the way back from Kigali to have a few days to relax before the start of a new school semester and new responsibilities. But I found myself jittery and disoriented and broken open after the intensity of East Africa. Not even prayers helped to calm my mind. It was winter in Amsterdam, and I wanted a quiet place to reflect that was warm and serene. On a map, I located the Hortus Botanicus, one of the oldest botanical gardens in the world, and walked for thirty minutes in the cold from my hotel. 

Once inside the greenhouse, I found a place to sit under a three hundred and fifty year old Eastern Cape giant cycad from South Africa, also called a bread tree. Cycads are often mistaken for palm trees, but they are distant cousins -- cycads feature cones with seeds like pine trees, where palms flower and bear fruit such as dates and coconuts. This particular cycad in the Hortus Botanicus is so aged and huge that it is not moved outside of the greenhouse in fair weather like most other plants in the collection. Instead, it sits, stately and serene, in the Palm Greenhouse, year round. Like other cycads, this one is part of a botanical lineage that is older than the dinosaurs at over 200 million years old; its slow-growing relatives in the wild are protected under international law due to extreme vulnerability from illegal trade and loss of habitat. Sitting underneath that grand bread tree, I felt I could finally breathe. I let myself cry and feel the tender sadness of the people in Rwanda and the tiny spark of hope they are nurturing. This elderly tree has itself seen the Dutch Golden Age of colonialism, trade, and finance; the wars with England and France; religious conflicts; and two devastating World Wars. The tree’s lineage has observed the rises and falls of humankind, all the wonderful and terrible things we have done to each other for thousands of years. And, having beheld all of that, the old cycad was able to hold all I was feeling after spending time with the lovely Rwandans as they recovered. The giant cycad and its eighty-five million year old relatives, the palms, have been witnesses, providing dignified presence for the long, winding history of humanity, providing shelter in bleak times, fresh air, and inspiration, too.

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Merwin figured this out over forty years ago. He gave his life to the trees, and the trees gave life back to him. They gave him poems that express the love and fear, grace and anguish, anger and dreams of the whole human experience. Merwin conveys this deeply rooted knowing in the poem “To the New Year,” which speaks about morning in a palm grove:

so this is the sound of you  
here and now whether or not  
anyone hears it this is  
where we have come with our age  
our knowledge such as it is  
and our hopes such as they are  
invisible before us  
untouched and still possible  

The paradise of the trees stores a kind of wisdom, which provided a space where Merwin could tune in and listen to the still smal l voice inside of him. In their calm, leaved sanctuary, he became acutely aware of all that we human beings have seen, and he heard the promise of what we can be. This is his legacy in language and leaves, rooted in a quiet wisdom that spreads out across millions of years and into the very ground, the heart of creation. The poet, through the work of reconciling poems and palms, has restored the Genius of the Place to the rest of us, we humans and trees.

Shan Overton teaches writing and directs the Writing Center at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary. Her own writing focuses on spirituality, the arts, nature, theological imagination, and creating a new world together.