Author Archives: St Francis Webguy

Musing on Trees and Gardens

Trees (and gardens) are on my mind this fortnight.

Liz Young writes, “As I counted the number of trees around my garden this week, I found that, twenty years ago, I had planted twenty different native species and varieties: four different pohutakawa from the Pacific (Lord Howe Island, Hawaii, the Kermadecs and Tahiti) and sixteen different New Zealand native species. As I expressed this with some pride to my brother in Canada, it occurred to us that in the garden that we grew up in, a centuries old ‘monastic’ house near Glastonbury Abbey, they had planted ten different English species there. The chicken run in which I played was under a yew and the swing was hung from a walnut tree. Impressive to me, but I was awed to read in JT Salmon’s book of NZ trees to learn that New Zealand, with its more temperate climate, has more than a hundred different species of tree.”

We Remember Them

The Mark reading is the story of Jesus’s death. Usually a Good Friday reading, it relates Jesus’s last moments before he died. We know that this was not the final chapter in his life though. He had told his disciples several times that he was going to die, but that he would be raised on the third day, and it was so. We have just recently celebrated Easter and his resurrection.

Today we commemorate the landing of Australian and New Zealand troops on the Gallipoli Peninsula in Turkey.

Dangerous Memory

On Wednesday evening just after Easter I joined the Auckland Jewish community for a memorial service for the Shoah, the Holocaust. During the service, the words “Never forget” were spoken many times. It is an exhortation to an active remembering with the purpose of ensuring that such an event can never occur again; and not just that there could be no such horror again, but that that the seed bed of hatred and discrimination that leads to such things cannot be allowed to be fostered in our society.