Grace Episcopal Church on Brainerd Road recently won a national award for its garden and arboretum, and on a recent cold and windy day, three women gathered over a dead looking patch of plants where they said bees and other creatures find refuge in winter.
"When you cut those down to make it look cleaner," church garden chief Lisa Lemza said, "you are eliminating those animals and insects — they are animals, insects are wildlife, people don't think about them that way but they are — just for a human aesthetic that is essentially meaningless."
Such are the trade-offs facing public, institutional and home gardens alike, often bent to the bland expectations of beauty, that according to Lemza, fellow gardener Kristina Shaneyfelt and their pastor, April Berends, pale in comparison to a bio-diverse, interconnected ecosystem that reflects the efforts of a divine hand.
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Chattanooga’s Grace Episcopal grounds lauded for being a ‘haven for people and wildlife’
Most churches in town, according to Lemza, are buildings with parking lots attached.
"Car habitat," she said, "not human habitat. It's certainly not Godly."
In recent years, Grace Episcopal Church has sought to model a different vision.
"Our point to faith communities is: 'What do your grounds — what do they say about your God?'" Lemza said. “What is the face of the God? What do your grounds say it is? Not what you say inside.”
Berends cut in: Is God wild? she asked. She thinks so.
Lemza agreed. "God is wiiiillldd," she said.
The grounds of Grace Episcopal Church are certified by, among other entities, the National Wildlife Federation, the North American Butterfly Association, the Monarch Waystation Program and the Tennessee Urban Forestry Council.
Why bother with all that stuff? The point, Lemza said, is to educate, demonstrate and "brag."
The church's recent award came in the "Sacred Grounds" category of the "Cool Congregation Challenge" put on by the national group Interfaith Power and Light.
Lemza said the application for the award requested detailed information about hard-to-quantify matters like water runoff and gave her "heartburn."
In a news release, Interfaith Power and Light credited the Chattanooga church with taking a "conventionally maintained" 3-acre property characterized by chemicals, unchecked invasive plants and constant mowing, and — despite initial skepticism from some parishioners — restoring native habitat and lush parkland in a neighborhood short on it.
"Grace Episcopal Church in Chattanooga, Tennessee, has transformed its property into a haven for people and wildlife in their community," the release said.
The courtyard at the center of the church now contains mostly native plants. Lemza and Shaneyfelt said there's no need to be rigid on the matter, and they do weed and eventually cut the brown stems down so the space is recognizable as a garden to others.
"It's coherent," Lemza said. "That's good design. You have to design it, though. You can't just let it be one big red hot mess."
"Well I mean you can," Shaneyfelt said, "but — "
"No, we're not going to do that," Lemza said. "I make no apologies for it being a garden."
"It also helps with education when it's attractive," Shaneyfelt said. "Because then people are more likely to hear you than if you're standing in front of a great big field that they don't understand."
Near the plot of stems in the courtyard there was once an "old-fashioned, sweet little fountain," Lemza said. "Nobody wanted to mess with it. You know how churches are."
Lemza and Shaneyfelt pushed in 2020 to replace it with a bigger one that could function as a water source — the only consistent one, they said, for about a mile around.
Now, the master gardeners said, squirrels slide down the roof seeking to hydrate. Insects abound, as do the birds — not just robins, sometimes even a hawk.
In a time of collapsing biodiversity driven largely by human activity, Lemza said the idea is to make an ark, to carry as many species forward as far and long as possible.
"That seems to be worthy of any faith community," she said. "These are God's handiwork. We owe them a chance to escape oblivion and extinction."
The head gardeners and their pastor left the courtyard and went to a field flanking the church, where a bunch of pink flags marked native plants recently seeded, helping them track which were and were not thriving.
The soil there had been enriched by years of fallen leaves, left unraked and unblown. Some came from a mighty nearby oak, which the gardeners said could in itself house hundreds of species.
Before a butterfly forms, its chrysalis needs a soft landing. Leaves do the trick.
Lemza imitated a shrill high voice of a hypothetical person who says: "'I don't see lightning bugs anymore! When I was a kid there was a lot of them!'"
She reverted to her normal voice. "Well, because you're out there with your blower."
The women continued around the church to a structure with a roof covered in plants, adjacent to a free garden community members can draw from with other raised beds available for rent.
They looked out onto a car-filled Brainerd Road and another huge and nearly empty parking lot across the way. They eyed a section of their own parking lot, a space of untapped potential.
"If we had more money, we'd be happy to put up solar panels." Lemza said. "All we need is a grant from the Tennessee state legislature."
Contact Andrew Schwartz at aschwartz@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6431.