Council Tree Garden Autumn 2025 Update
Hello Council Tree friends and family. I’d like to update you all on what’s going on out here in the garden. This year we decided that the land needed a rest, a sabbath. We knew some things needed to change, but no one was quite sure what that meant or looked like. This sabbath year gave us the chance to pray, and listen for God’s leading. To imagine, and dream. The land itself, of course, did not take a year off. As anyone who saw the garden this year knows, it grew and produced abundantly. The sabbath it got was a rest from human control. We let the garden grow what it wanted to grow, and we lovingly tended what it brought forth.
Over the course of the growing season, as we watched the garden grow, as we interacted with the people, plants, animals and insects that make up our garden community, a vision began to emerge. A vision of Colorado native plants, integrated with the berries, fruits and vegetables we know and love. A vision of a more established, mature perennial garden, with plants that we can get to know, and grow together with, like old friends. A place that invites people to come, sit, rest, heal, and pray. A place that is home for birds, bees, butterflies and other pollinators, many of which are threatened or endangered due to habitat loss. In short, a sanctuary. A place to interact with God and His Creation.
We also want to remember and honor the displaced people who once called this land their home. The people who tended to and were sustained by this land in the not too distant past. The people who held peaceful meetings at the Council Tree after which our church is named.
Back in August a group of us went up to the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming to listen to the stories of the Arapaho, who once called this land their home. Many were the stories we heard, and two recurring themes we heard over and over. Themes of gratitude and resounding hope. Hope for a remembering of who we are. Hope for Native and non-Native alike working together to care for, and be cared for by, the land. Hope that we will walk together, once again, with the Creator, in a garden.
When we returned home from that trip, the vision for the garden was clear.
The garden is already laid out like a medicine wheel, with a section facing each of the four directions. We are taking two of these sections, the south and the west, and restoring them to native plants, with a focus on indigenous food and medicine. Enter the Chokecherry, staple food of the plains peoples. Buffalo Berry, Serviceberry, Elder and Currant, Sunflower and Sochan, Sage and Rabbitbrush and Milkweed and so much more. Native plants that also embody the Hippocratic oath: “Let food by thy medicine, and medicine by thy food.” We are recreating a sort of microcosm of the landscapes typical of our region, with native prairie grass, a dry creekbed, or arroyo, an arid section, and a wetland.
We applied for a grant from Nature in the City to help us make some of these changes. The grant, if received, will allow us to bring in more mature plants, as well as fund a pergola in the center. The pergola will provide a bit of shade in the garden. A place for volunteers to escape the summer sun for a bit. A place for church and community gatherings, and educational events, like learning about how to harvest and use the plants growing in the garden. Both a working space and a resting space.
Plants, like people, are fun, and there are so many interesting characters that I want to introduce you to. Each one shows us something unique about God, the author of all Creation. Our garden community, by interacting with and caring for God’s creation, is learning together who God is. And what’s so wonderful about that is that God is infinite, there’s always more to learn. And yet He is consistent. He is love. He cares about the sparrow, and the lily, and He is the same yesterday, today and tomorrow.
If you want to be a part of working directly with God’s creation, of seeing His wonders up close, come on out anytime, there’s always room for you, and work to be done. I am going to take a long winter’s nap now, and I’ll see you all in spring. Until then, God bless you, and thank you.
~Rico Lighthouse,
your (humbled) Council Tree Gardener.
