Commentary

I was three weeks late from the peak of the season, but many of the roses at Elizabeth Park in Hartford, Connecticut, were still in bloom when I visited. The experience provokes deep reflection on core issues such as how beauty, charity, and commitment are so crucial to the good society.

In all my travels in the United States and abroad, I’ve never seen a garden like this one. It remains the largest and oldest municipal rose garden in the United States. In a world of demoralization and decay, its very existence seems improbable, even impossible. And yet there it is in all its astonishing beauty, open to the public all day and night, with no restrictions and no fees.

Any day of the week, you can walk right in and see the huge diversity of visitors from all nations and all ages. There are people with picnic baskets set up on checkered blankets, kids throwing frisbees, and serious people holding maps of the 10,000 rose bushes with 700 varieties and touring the entire place. From there, people walk to the pond with ducks and geese everywhere.

The original design dates from the 1880s and was gifted to the city from the private estate of financier Charles M. Pond. The garden opened to the public in 1904 and was expanded throughout the decades. At some point in the 1960s and 1970s, it became too much—just maintaining such a thing is a herculean effort—and it fell into disrepair.

Private citizens of the community got together and formed a new charitable organization, the Elizabeth Park Conservancy. The city then contracted out maintenance to this new entity. It is not well-funded but instead relies on the dedication of its members and volunteers together with professionals to work the place most of the year. On any one day, you can find people with wheelbarrows clipping and cutting and tending to the garden.

It’s a massive effort but the results are truly awe-inspiring. As I walked I kept asking myself why and how this happens. It’s not because anyone is forced and it’s not because it is profitable, which it obviously is not. It is because many people believe in bringing beauty and joy to the community. It’s as simple as that. They think it matters and it does.

The entire place lives as a tribute to what love, dedication, hard work, philanthropy, and community concern means for the world. In a time when our public lives are dominated by massive bureaucracies and operationally anodyne big-box corporations, a garden like this reminds one of what truly matters.

It is underappreciated just to what extent institutions like this make the world in which we live much more civilized and wonderful than it would otherwise be. Indeed, it is a mark of high civilization. It is not created by the instinct to rule or exploit others but by the desire to make wonderful things come to life for others.

In so many ways, this kind of motivation is a building block of a good society. It would have been easy enough in 1977 to observe that the garden was unprofitable, that the land could be put to better uses, that the community could not afford to keep it up. But enough people of means and vision stepped up and said no, we must preserve this for the good of the community and the good of the world. We simply cannot allow great things just to die. We must work and sacrifice to preserve them.

My fear is that in our increasingly brutalized world, we forget just how important this is. Indeed, this great country was in many ways built by precisely this kind of love. It is not governments and large corporations that achieve this sort of thing. It is communities and commitment that do so, and their efforts are fueled by a deep passion for serving others and improving public life.

By the way, I’m sure that the Conservancy would welcome your support. In fact, here is a slightly funny story. I was walking through the garden yesterday and began speaking to a woman who was looking at various things and I began to give an impassioned talk about the history of the place, just to make sure everyone understood how special this place is.

The lady smiled the whole time and when I quieted down she introduced herself as the chairman of the Conservancy! Of course I felt ridiculous. I thanked her for her beautiful service and work.

Along the same lines, I’m very excited to learn that there is a movie coming out about the 19th century heroine St. Mother Cabrini (born in 1850 and died in 1917). It is produced and directed by Alejandro Monteverde, the person who made “The Sound of Freedom.” Finally Mother Cabrini’s story will be told to the multitudes. I’ve read several biographies of her and been inspired by the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus that she founded.

Essentially, Mother Cabrini started with nothing in the United States and gradually built an incredible empire of orphanages, schools, and hospitals focused on serving the immigrant community in the 1890s and following. She raised money from many Gilded Age fortunes and attracted vocations from women all over the world. She managed as many people as a Fortune 500 company does today.

The story of her charitable work is largely forgotten today. Or perhaps we should say suppressed. We are taught to believe that charity, education, and health care, plus service to the poor, is the job of governments and public-sector agencies. The work of Mother Cabrini proves otherwise. This massive sector of sacrifice-based and mission-based charity work was built by love, dedication, and faith, and funded entirely through philanthropy.

This enormous apparatus was eventually crowded out by “progressive” public-sector efforts that are not and can never be as humane and effective as voluntary efforts driven by moral and community commitment. The highly educated elite promised that their “scientific” efforts could improve on the work of private charity but they were and are wrong. Instead they made a mess of things, while cruelly driving out philanthropic efforts.

What do the rose gardens of Elizabeth Park and the history of Mother Cabrini have in common? They both illustrate the enormous power and effectiveness of voluntary efforts to make the world a better place. It is neither force nor profit that achieved these things but love and dedication to a vision of a better world. This truth is too often lost in our current ideological struggles between left and right. In the end, it is not ideology that makes the world beautiful but love.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.