BY KRISTA RAMSEY
The Cincinnati Enquirer
The most important thing to know about Peggy St. Clair is that she is a healer.
The second most important thing is that she believes healing takes place in the garden.
The third thing is that it has happened to her.
At the Civic Garden Center, they call her the director of education, but it hardly does justice to the passion Peggy brings to her work -- starting gardening classes, speaking to visiting groups, forming networks among horticultural experts.
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If you go
Civic Garden Center Plant, Herb and Hosta Sale, today, 9 a.m.-3 p.m., 2715 Reading Road, Avondale.
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At heart, she is a grass-roots campaigner, speaking eloquently on behalf of grass, roots and other natural things.
All of which makes her sound green-peacey and tree-huggy. Actually, besides saving the earth, her point is to save the people on it.
A need for the soil
Peggy St. Clair believes that we are lost. She believes that we have lost our souls to commercialism and a downward spiral of upward mobility. She believes that we have moved away from the spiritual lessons of nature at our own peril.
She is convinced that we were better off when we worked the land, put our hands in the soil and our faces to the wind.
She believes people find important things in the natural world. Peace. Strength. Themselves. God.
"There are so many lessons learned working the earth, and it seems we have lost that," she says in a sunny corner of the garden center. "There are a lot of rootless people out there. There's a kind of emptiness in them."
She knows people want to connect with nature. She watches hospital workers slip across Reading Road at lunchtime for a few moments in the Hauck Botanic Garden that surrounds the Civic Garden Center. She sees schoolchildren, growing up in a cocoon of concrete, tear off leaves and blossoms, slipping them into their pockets for "an experience with something green."
Peggy knows they are looking for healing. She knows they are seeking solace in nature. She knows because she did so herself. As a child, Peggy took comfort in nature. Growing up near green spaces, she went often to a nearby woods, a patch of strawberries, a neighbor's vegetable garden. They all became safe spaces for a child who deeply needed something peaceful and good.
When she tells an audience, "Gardening changed my life. I couldn't have survived without it," she means exactly what she says.
Wherever she was, whatever her circumstances, Peggy has always tended gardens. A vegetable garden in college, when it was hardly the fashionable thing to do. The gift of an entire garden -- flowers, bulbs, shrubs -- for a friend whose husband was critically ill. A garden design business. And a desperate kind of gardening when she lost her home, friends, belongings and spouse in a difficult divorce.
"All the things that had meant so much to me were gone -- a home, having the right chintz on my couch, having children who went to the right schools," she says. "I lost my sense of self. I lost all my dreams."
But she did not lose her safe space.
And again the garden saved her.
Her life's goal is to establish a safe space for others, a chunk of land where people can come, live, garden, do creative work and find their souls again, before they return to the world outside. "Our society tells us things that are not true," she says in a firm, quiet voice. "It tells us that this house will satisfy us, these clothes will satisfy us, this job. So we get this lifestyle, and then we can't maintain it. We work all the time. There's nobody home."
Peggy St. Clair is one of the people who can help Cincinnati find and keep its soul. Her truest place is in the garden. Her truest gift, helping people find home.
Krista Ramsey's column appears on Saturdays. Write her at the Enquirer, 312 Elm St. Cincinnati 45202.
RAMSEY ARCHIVE