The Garden above the Garden
From the 7th to the 12th floors, we have many children who are too medically fragile to come down from their floors to go outside. So we brought the outside up to them.
Wash U / St. Louis Children's is nearing the end of a ten year, multi-hundred million dollar expansion and reconstruction project. Part of that project was the installation of the 1.5 million dollar Olson Family Garden.
The Garden is built on a spacious stretch of rooftop almost three tennis courts in size, opening out on the eighth floor. At the end of a long carpeted hallway, between the in-hospital school, the teen patient lounge, the in-patient playroom that streches along the entire northwestern wall of the 8th floor, double-doors open out onto the walkway of the garden.
Being a garden for kids, there are all kinds of hidden surprises packed into every nook and cranny. There are little stone leapfrog paths admist flowing streams filled with golden fish. There's a one-ton granite globe of the world that floats and spins freely on a fountain of water. There are windchimes and lightcatchers, funny little statues and quiet nooks. There are literally hundreds of varieties of flowers, shrubs, and trees, carefully selected and timed such that the garden blooms and changes throughout the entire course of the long growing season; so that our kids who are here for months can have an ever-changing garden to explore and call home. And all of it an easy wheelchair roll for the kids who spend the long weeks and months and seasons on the 7th - 12th floors.
But most spectacular of all, perhaps, is the placement itself. Mounted on the western approach of the Wash U / St. Louis Children's complex, the Olson Family Garden was built above and overlooks the spectacular vista of Forest Park itself. From eight stories up, the whole of the thousands of square acres of the park -- larger than New York's Central -- stretches out in a 180 degree panorama, out to the towers of Clayton on the far western side. A beautiful view in any season, in autumn it becomes a blazing glory. And the designers of the garden, of course, made sure that the panorama was beautifully featured and framed, so that our kids could come out admist the flowers and the streams and the paths to the far end of the garden, and watch the sunset paint sky and forest with it's brilliant patina.
As intricately designed as a clockwork watch, the Olson Garden has won a long list of awards from professional horticulture, landscaping, and architecual organizations. But the most important review of the garden is the wonder and the joy it brings our hospital-bound kids. Children, too weak to rise from their wheelchairs, attached to myriad pumps and even portable respirators to breathe for them, are able to come out into the garden, touch a flower, hear the birds, smell the outside air. Children for which even the 70-foot journey down the elevator and across the street to Forest Park would be a journey too far can instead just roll down the hall. For our rehab kids, our kids with unusual and rare genetic disorders, our kids with cancer, for the too many kids whose brave battles last weeks, months, seasons here at Children's, this little piece of the outdoors brought up to them is a precious gift.
And every so often, the entire garden is quietly closed off and reserved for one child and their family, the child's bed and comfortable chairs brought out to the far-side of the garden. Because there's often no real reason a child has to die confined to the painted walls of their room, not when we have this garden up there with them. Not when these brave children can spend their last and say goodbye admist the blooming flowers and the sunset and the free blue of the sky above.
The garden was built for our patients; but many staff, of course, travel to the garden in all seasons for quiet time and contemplation. The rules are strict -- the garden is supposed to be an escape from white coated doctors and staff in scrubs, and so we make sure these things are off or packed before we go out there. But the garden is a beautiful place, and so many times I too have gone out there at the end of a long shift, to spend a little while on the western terrace overlooking the park, watching the birds wheel over the great spreading forests and the sun sinking below the horizon.
I go out there often, and I think about all the stories I have been a tiny part of, here and in my medical school training before. All the valiant children whose lives we've had the privelege of being a tiny part of, too many of whom left us far too young. Of life and death and love; and hope and miracles and men. And sometimes I say a quiet prayer; for our children, for those who love them, for us who serve them; that we might face the struggle -- face the end -- with courage and valor, with compassion and love.
Night too shall be beautiful
And blessed and its fear will pass
If I must leave, must cross the Sea
The love you gave is all I take with me...
Use well the days,
Use well the days;
Turn your face to the green world...
Use well the days.