Hydrangeas, Wonderland, and Quakerism

Directed by wholly useless New Zealand signage, about as helpful as the Scarecrow or the Cheshire Cat, our group found itself in the Hydrangea Gully of the Wellington Botanic Garden, a small valley featuring seemingly endless varieties of hydrangea flowers. Overwhelmed by the many beautiful shades of white, pink, purple, and blue, I began snapping away with my camera, though none of the pictures fully did the place justice; the tapestry of colors was like a Monet painting, each petal glowing brightly in the sunshine which peeked through the tree tops. I truly felt like Dorothy or Alice, plunged into a world quite different from my own, somewhere both beautiful and foreign, perfect in its way, yet tricky to make sense of.

This garden wasn’t quite like the one in Wonderland, with flowers that had faces and voices and feelings, and yet they spoke to me through color and aroma. Though I am no gardening expert, I know that certain types of hydrangeas have different flower colors depending on the acidity of the soil, with acidic soil producing bluer flowers, and alkaline soil yielding pinker flowers. As I gazed upon the overflowing beds of hydrangeas, I noticed that each plant was not confined to one color; rather, the shades blended and varied, and sometimes each individual bud had petals fluctuating from deep purple to pale pink.

In a way, these flowers made me think of the makeup of New Zealand itself, a place torn between the indigenous spirit of the Maori people and the colonizing forces of the Europeans. At some point, each plant in this bed was most certainly rigidly pink or blue, but with the passing of time, a more even and blurred composition has arisen, making the complete vision all the more beautiful.

It’s often said that the United States is a melting pot, but lately this image has been criticized as slightly inaccurate; truly, the States are more of a quilt, different but decidedly separate. Our culture, rather than amalgamating, has split like oil and water, so we have pockets of diversity that haven’t really blended. In truth, New Zealand is far more of a melting pot than the United States, and it is better off because of it. When I consider my many visits to the Little Italys and Chinatowns of Baltimore and Manhattan, I see how these experiences have molded me into someone who tries to categorize. I have been conditioned to put people into the spaces I believe they fit into; this person is a blue flower, and this person is pink. Even though I can acknowledge this fault, it is a hard habit to break.

I see now that this isn’t the way of the New Zealander. In certain respects, I think that this country encapsulates everything that my favorite religion, Quakerism, seeks to teach. One of the most crucial Quaker values is the idea of tolerating your neighbor; though we may not understand or like each other, the light of God is in everyone, and this is the part of the person we must see. I’ve found that New Zealanders in particular are good at achieving this balance, with the example of our tour guide, Rangimoana, in the Te Papa National Museum yesterday.

Rangimoana taught us the creation stories he learned as a Maori child, but always stressed that these tales weren’t the only version, and that other people were equally right in their interpretations of Maori legends. This openness, and willingness to accept many forms of truth and value, is something that I’ve noticed as a trend throughout this beautiful country.

Maybe this is negative thinking, but I wonder where we went wrong as a nation to be home to such polarized beliefs, having little to no ability to see things from another side. We too are a nation founded by colonizers, but instead of blending our beliefs with those of the native people, we nearly exterminated them and pushed them to the furthest reaches of the country we stole. Was that the turning point, at first contact? Could a moment so long ago have significantly molded our culture, politics, and outlook today? I think it’s possible.

Like my own tendency to define people prematurely, the American way will take a long time to correct, but I think that overcoming this shortcoming could do great things for our country. When I first came to New Zealand, it broke my heart thinking that I’d have to go back to the backwards old US of A, but now I see that this is my own prejudice coming out again. It’s not too late for the United States, just like it’s not too late for anyone, to change. I have faith.