BY STINKING LIZAVETA
SILVER SPRING, MD—It started with a single daisy four years ago, a white flower that bloomed out of nowhere in the middle of a small, homogenous garden of yellow daffodils at the Silver Spring Korean Seventh-day Adventist Church.
Several members did, of course, advocate uprooting the white flower and flinging it from hence, or using weedkillers to destroy it, or at least neglecting it in hopes that it wither away naturally. But the church, which recently went through a period of spiritual revival, and had been praying for the Holy Sprit to bring growth, decided to welcome the addition to the garden. They nurtured and cared for the daisy’s needs as best they could, adapting to the best of their ability, and waited to see if the soil in their garden couldn’t support a white flower as well as it could support a yellow one.
That was four years ago. On Monday, East Coast Gardening Magazine presented the Silver Spring Korean Seventh-day Adventist Church its prestigious Garden of Beauty award, which recognizes gardens that serve, enhance, and transform their surrounding communities.
Looking over the church’s thriving garden today, it’s hard to imagine what the past once was. The garden then was small and shrinking. The garden today is bursting the limits of the church’s land. The garden then was half-filled with dying old flowers, sickly young ones, and a few disgruntled hybrids. The garden today crowds together healthy flowers at all stages of growth. The garden then was homogenous yellow. The garden today, while still containing plenty of yellow daffodils, paints its landscape with multicolored blooms—white daisies, black tulips, brown roses, and all forms of unique hybrids, all waving together in the wind as if singing praise to God.
“We never imagined our little garden could thrive so much,” said Pastor Yong Kim, the church’s senior pastor. “We never imagined that the soil we had was capable of nourishing many different types of flowers, and helping each to grow healthy and produce seeds. But we started reaching out, and made a few adjustments to meet the needs of different flowers, and made efforts to care for each flower equally well. Then word got out that our church welcomed a variety of flowers, and produced a surplus of bulbs and seeds each year, and growth just exploded from there. Our mistake for not doing this before.”
Members do note growing pains: for example, some yellow daffodils have tried to choke off the brown roses, and the black tulips have a tendency to grow real tall and wave quite loudly in the wind. There were issues of what flower goes where in the garden, and how to best arrange and organize things.
“But since we were focused on welcoming new flowers and nurturing them to a point where they could produce new plants themselves, a lot of the problems worked themselves out automatically,” said Pastor Kim. “Many of our church’s problems went away when we started worrying about providing good soil first, instead of worrying about only growing yellow flowers.”
With its garden threatening to exceed the capacity of its land, the Silver Spring Korean Church is working feverishly to plant three more gardens in different locations in the city. They are also helping other churches improve the gardens they already have.
“Right now we’re trying to get the New Jerusalem SDA Church to realize that their good soil is capable of supporting more than just black flowers,” Pastor Kim said.
