Book Review

A picture’s worth 5,000 words

By Andrew Junker, The Catholic Sun
December 21, 2006

Holy Orders and horticulture are terms most people would never link together. Sedona priest Fr. J.C. Ortiz sets out to prove the two concepts go together quite nicely in his new book, “The Sedona Gardens of St. John Vianney.”

He’s right. Monasteries throughout the ages have been famed for their gardens. Jesuit poet Gerard Manly Hopkins wrote many verses extolling the world’s natural beauty.

And in “Romeo and Juliet,” Shakespeare gave the world perhaps the most famous priest/gardener with his tragically well-intentioned Friar Laurence.

Though he may not be as famous as those other plant-loving priests, Fr. Ortiz shows that he might be the most dedicated gardener who ever lived.

Since being named pastor of St. John Vianney Parish in Sedona 12 years ago, Fr. Ortiz has slowly transformed the church grounds into a garden of tremendous beauty.

This large, coffee-table-like book chronicles the result of Fr. Ortiz’s labor. The photographs proceed seasonally, beginning and ending with shots of a winter landscape lightly dusted with snow.

As the reader moves through the months, the variety of flowers with their different colors startles and pleases the eye.

It helps that Fr. Ortiz was able to tend such versatile land. Sedona affords an incredible mixture of landscape. High desert, forests and mountains form the changing backdrop of Fr. Ortiz’s collection of tulips, pine trees and cacti.

All these elements work together to form a distinctive mélange of floral sights. The book shows the diversity of beauty that can thrive in Arizona.

Fr. Ortiz must have noticed the seemingly random diversity of plant-life in the photos, which somehow manages to form a unity. The prose he wrote accompanying the images is similarly jumbled, but less effective.

He describes the book in his introduction as a “quasi memoir.” It is also quasi-inspirational reading and a quasi journal of the various goings-on at his parish.

For each month in the book, Fr. Ortiz wrote a little vignette or reflection on the changing seasons and the flora produced during that time.

December begins with a memory of his first being assigned to the Sedona parish and the loneliness he felt as a priest in a new city. Similar personal memories pepper the book throughout, but Fr. Ortiz fails to establish any sort of propelling narrative.

He gives some interesting snips about his grandmother and her garden, and the role plants played in comforting him at seminary, but just when the reader is becoming invested in Fr. Ortiz’s story, he switches gears to inspirational prose about the changing of the seasons.

This section of the book is filled with references to everyone’s “journey of life,” and features musings on the communal aspects of gardens.

Fr. Ortiz first points out the importance of gardens and nature in Scripture. Our home before Adam’s fall was in a garden, and Christ spent the night before His death in an olive grove.

These two gardens bookend nicely the strange relationship humans have with nature in general. The flowers and trees of this world offer both solace and a vague sense of unease to the imagination.

It’s hard to forget what happened after both Eden and Gethsemane. 

This life and death tension in the natural world led Hopkins to believe that only the “Holy Ghost” brooding “over the bent world” with “warm breast and ah! bright wings” could explain the tenuous balance holding the world together.

His poetry necessarily leads upward from an appreciation of nature to a challenging sense of wonderment in its Creator and vivifying force.

Fr. Ortiz’s reflections, on the other hand, focus mainly on friendship and camaraderie. While he explores these topics well, one misses an exploration of the tension held in natural beauty that consistently confronts.

Also, throughout the book, Fr. Ortiz makes first-name reference to members of his parish. He does this just infrequently enough that the reader can never quite remember if this or that person has been mentioned before, and just frequently enough so that the reader feels like he or she is always on the outside of an inside-joke.

But lest these grievances startle, the photos in the book are often astounding and a joy to look at. Fr. Ortiz’s green thumb reminds Arizonans of the beauty all around them.

Andrew Junker is a staff writer for The Catholic Sun. Comments are welcomed. Send e-mail to letters@catholisun.org.