ALAN CHADWICK IS GONE

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The smoking stars gather against it . . . the one who cares for flowers is leaving us.(from an Aztec song)

Most regular readers of this publicationalready know Alan Chadwick as the founder of the biodynamic/French intensive school oil horticulture. Many, no doubt, can even name a few of the sites — the University of California at Santa Cruz, the Green Gulch retreat, Virginia's Carmel in the Valley, and others — whose soil has experienced his magic. It's strange, then, that few people know much about Alan's background. . . about the influences and forces that fed this exceptional man to develop what could well be the most truly wholistic gardening method in existence.

So, since MOTHER has visited with Alan many times in the past, we'd like to present — by way of tribute — a brief biography of this extraordinary man . . . in both our words and his own.

Alan Chadwick was born — on July 27, 1909 — into the "upper crust" of Edwardian England's society. The family estate was enormous and dotted with formal gardens of varying themes and sizes. However, although the early exposure to such careful horticulture certainly, inspired Alan, his mother was the major influence upon the young boy.

"She was extremely artistic," he told us, "and gave me — at a terribly early age — an interest in all forms of creativity . . . and particularly in horticulture and the mystery that is the garden."

Chadwick's mother was also responsible for introducing her son to another strong influence . . . the mystic Austrian philosopher, Rudolph Steiner, whose theories about the interrelatedness of living things were later to contribute to the development of Alan's own gardening methods. Steiner was, however, regarded as an "utter crank" by most of his peers, and Chadwick has explained that the attitude of house guests toward his tutor ("Very often, at tea or dinner, they would turn to me and say, with just the slightest curl of the lip, 'Do you really study with that man, then?' ") served to further isolate the teenager who, from early youth, "never liked human beings . . . always got on with them in the worst way''.

But, though Alan had very little use for social interaction, his incredible energies led him to excel in any number of pursuits. The young man was to became a gold medal skier and skater, a professional painter and violinist, and a Shakespearean actor (a career which he followed for 32 years) ... studying gardening all the while. (It was, in Chadwick's own words, "the one means of resuscitation, where the energy for my other activities was generated".)