A Vineyard wild flower sanctuary, where native plants, flowers and shrubs will be planted and protected, under conditions which will allow the general public to see and enjoy them, is in the process of becoming a reality at Christiantown. Mrs. Wilfrid O. White of Vineyard Haven, president of the Martha’s Vineyard Garden Club, has been given permission, and some financial aid, by the county board, with which to pit her plan into operation on the county-owned land adjacent to the Indian burying ground on this historic spot, and the initial survey has been made by Will C.
Just two days after Arbor Day, which comes April 26, is Spring Planting Day at the Christiantown Burial Ground in North Tisbury. The Martha’s Vineyard Garden Club has planned the event at Christiantown, home of the now vanished Praying Indians, and will plant both seeds and actual plants of any wild flowers which members can procure and contribute. Gardeners are urged to take their lunch and be at the historic rendezvous at 12 noon on Monday, April 28, or if that day should prove rainy, the next pleasant day.
On my last visit to the Vineyard, in September, I was shocked at the condition of the Mayhew Chapel in Christiantown: windows broken, exterior shingles rotting, bird droppings on benches inside, weeds taking over the burial ground.
To live in Christiantown is to abide by the laws, quirks and schedules of hundreds of other animals that share these primeval woods. If you are not a naturalist and a natural philosopher when you first move here, you will become one through regular contact with furry, scaly, fanged and feathered neighbors.
I am just back from troubled Israel. There, an ultra-Orthodox Jew of the Haredi sect spat on an eight-year-old girl he deemed immodestly dressed and other ultra-orthodox members of that sect were insisting that women sit at the back of public buses. A settlement illegally built by ultra-orthodox Zionists on the Palestinian West Bank was demolished by Israeli Army soldiers. And the Israeli government, fearful of Iran’s nuclear capabilities, was hinting at making a pre-emptive strike against that country.
