Gardening soothes Dallas man’s childhood of fear and deprivation

John Ajak, a Lost Boy of Sudan now 32, has something in common with all North Texas gardeners, despite the vast differences between his past and the majority of ours. Ajak calls his work tending display gardens at the Dallas Arboretum his therapy. When I began to talk to him about how gardening was my therapy, too, I quickly found myself blubbering.

Was I boo-hooing because gardening, for me, is so connected to my late mother? Or because I can no longer dig in the dirt, due to a back injury three years ago?

Maybe I was moved to tears because, having read Ajak’s just-published memoir about the vicious civil war in what is now South Sudan, I knew he was separated from his mother for 25 years, each thinking the other dead. Ajak, as a boy of only 7, ran for his life for literally 14 years, dodging bullets and crocodiles, hobbling on skinned feet, starving and dehydrated, often gulping water thick with stagnation and animal feces.

Ajak’s smile is broad, brilliant and genuine, a gift freely given to a stranger. Although he has earned two graduate degrees since his 2001 resettlement by Catholic Charities, he keeps his job at the Dallas Arboretum. He will tell you proudly that he is a gardener, something like his late father, a farmer who grew cassava for food. The arboretum plants cassava, what Americans call tapioca, as a summer ornamental.

He has earned extra responsibilities at this job of 12 years, both on paper and among his colleagues. He has a knack for envisioning what a fairytale house made of pumpkins or a flower bed in the Jonsson Color Garden should look like in the end. When co-workers are stymied, they come to Ajak, saying, “You have magic hands. Make it work.”

There are many reasons Ajak calls the arboretum his therapy. There is the physical beauty of the place; hundreds of thousands visit it annually for that reason. That Ajak has a role in that beauty is salve for his inner wounds, which he kept locked inside until he decided to write Unspeakable: My Journey as a Lost Boy of Sudan.

He loves to watch children at the arboretum tumbling on the grass, squealing at squirrels, marveling at the houses made of pumpkins and flowers. Happy, content children remind him of his life before civil war, before he was hunted, before the years of a refugee camp in Kenya, when his father was alive and family mattered more than anything else.

“I feel I belong here. I feel I connect with the plants,” says Ajak, a 6-foot-7-inch man in like-new athletic shoes and an arboretum sweatshirt. “I am doing something to make the children happy. My heart is always filled with joy.”

Passage after passage in the self-published book describes the boy Ajak’s days in the brush or jungle, dodging bullets, hearing others’ screams of torture, afraid to sleep for fear of being eaten by a wild animal, and walking, always walking, in search of safety. Even after reading the words on the page, it is impossible to imagine what he and other children endured.

Ajak’s reason for writing the book is to offer the possibility of hope to others, particularly to children in Dallas, in Texas, who are poor, hungry or alone. Can anyone refute his assertion that his life today is proof that everything is possible, no matter where you come from, what you have suffered?

“If I would be able to reach any poor kid,” Ajak says, “I would be glad. I used to struggle not to talk about what I have seen. But love and suffering have no boundaries.”

Love is what Ajak focuses on now. Although he is separated from his family by continents, he budgets 50 percent of his salary to pay for the education of his seven younger siblings. The youngest of them he does not even know, yet the family bond among Dinka tribesmen is that strong. Four finished high school, a fifth has a college degree.

With the youngest about to finish college, one might think Ajak could focus on his own life now. He would like to fall in love and become a father one day, but he does not feel financially ready.

“I have not looked yet,” he says, dimpling. Instead, the Sudanese-American will put any book profits (he’s planning a sequel) toward buying school supplies for the children in the villages wracked by civil war. School, almost everywhere, is a chalkboard under a tree, with a village volunteer as the teacher. There are no pens, pencils or paper — until Ajak gets to work on the problem.

The love shown Ajak in his life, first by his parents, later by the arboretum and other Texans, he says, compels him to give back what he can.

“Even though I have nothing to give,” he says, his eyes revealing little of what he has endured, “I give my heart.”

Like his knack for envisioning a finished project, John Ajak also has a knack for a turn of phrase. It is not from book-learning, but, again, my imagination fails to comprehend this man.

He returns our conversation to his daily joy, his job at the arboretum among the flowers.

“I’m a spring guy,” he says, mentioning the tulips and daffodils that draw hundreds of thousands to the botanical garden every March and April.

Tips for artisan hot cocoa at home

Whether you’re looking for a post-snowball pick-me-up or a warming sip on a chilly day, there are few things more sweetly nostalgic than a cup of hot cocoa. A real one, that is, not that reconstituted powder that comes in a box adorned with Alpine scenes. No actual Swiss miss drinks that stuff. And neither will you after Alice Medrich gets through with you.

The queen of chocolate — and author of the new “Seriously Bitter Sweet” (Artisan, $25.95, 336 pages) — introduced this country to the glories of Parisian-style truffles 40 years ago at Cocolat, her shop in Berkeley’s Gourmet Ghetto. Now she’s sharing her tips on how to make a French-style demitasse of deeply chocolate richness.

“My hot chocolate is an outlier,” she says. “It’s more of an adult thing. There are so many interesting craft chocolates. This is a really special little cup for people who want to sample the new chocolates.”

Use water and milk, not cream.

“Less creaminess and less fat allow us to taste more of the complex and subtle flavors,” she says. “Put whipped cream on top, as opposed to in. It gives you contrast, which makes chocolate taste chocolatier.”

She also advises to make it ahead of time.

“I learned this from the woman who owns the quirky little chocolate shop in the 10th arrondissement. If you make your hot cocoa with real chocolate and let it stand overnight (in the refrigerator), all the cocoa particles swell. When you reheat it, you get a thicker mixture,” she says.

Just keep the temperature below 180 when you reheat the mixture to preserve the body and flavor.

The higher the cacao percentage, the more intense and less sweet, but there’s room for other variation, too.

“I love the idea of sprinkling spices and playing around with flavors,” Medrich says. “People tend to think, let’s go cinnamon. But open your spice drawer and try stuff. It’s, like, too much fun.”

Parents, save the gardening lessons for school

A report from the RHS has shown that teaching gardening in schools is a great help to children in their other studies, their sense of self worth and their wellbeing. It seems now there are another three R's that we can look to for guidance and results because after school gardening a child becomes "Ready to learn, Resilient & Responsible". The RHS report makes very bold and wide-ranging claims about the benefits of school gardening. I'm not qualified to assess whether they are true of not, but I am all in favor of the gardening curriculum. Anything that broadens a child's experience in school is surely a good thing. I am almost too old to remember my school days, but visions of endless hours sitting stuck behind a desk still linger. To go out and move around was reward enough, whatever the teacher's ulterior motive. So getting outside is a beneficial thing for children, as to whether it's real value is in "gardening", I'm not sure. What I am sure is that I struggle to marry my own experiences of children and gardening with the RHS report.

For example, Dame Gillian Pugh introduces the report with this:

    There can be few more rewarding experiences – for either children or adults – than watching the seeds they have sown, sometimes more in hope than expectation, push up through the soil and grow into beautiful flowers or vegetables that they can pick and eat.

This isn't my reality. I have spent many hours and lots of money trying to encourage my children to garden. We have planted bulbs and seeds, cut flowers, picked peas and strawberries. Together the eight-year-old and I have created fairy gardens and planted window boxes. The result is always the same. After about 10 to 15 minutes of "gardening", she's had enough and wanders off to instigate an argument with her sister. I am left to finish off.

I think the reality is that there is no escaping the fact that gardening is a chore. The weeding, the digging, the pruning, the deadheading, the weeding again ... It's like tidying your bedroom but outdoors. As adults who like the results of gardening, it is a necessary evil. It may all be a little different if there were sweet trees; but as nature stands at the moment, to a child, the results just aren't that interesting. So I disagree with Gillian Pugh. A child may like to pick a home-grown strawberry, but it's not such a great thing that they will bother to tend the plant in order to get the fruit.

After years of trying I now believe that trying to get your children to garden is not only a waste of time and money, it is also depressing for the adult and leads to conflict and disappointment. These are not good emotions to start fostering a love of nature and gardening. I have lost count of the number of times the newly planted seeds and tender seedlings have been demolished by overenthusiastic watering. How many times I have said "Not like that!" or "Please don't ..."

Where, then, does this lead us in the debate with the RHS and encouraging gardening? How can I endorse school gardening and not home gardening? I think there are two things that need to be considered. First, school is where a child expects to learn in a particular way, it's very task orientated. 1) Plant seed. 2) Draw picture. 3) Write expected result (and draw picture). 4) Go back to see result (and draw picture). It's very structured and with an end goal, unlike real gardening, which has no end! So I think gardening at school isn't really gardening - just science, allotment-style.

The second point is that the relationship between teachers and children is very clearly defined. The teacher, is there to teach and correct (and all the positive stuff too). With the parent, it's more complex, challenging and changing. I heard a quote once that "a child learns everything from a parent but you can't tell them anything". I feel that in constantly trying to cajole and maneuver my children into "gardening", I have stifled their natural curiosity and enjoyment of the garden. My eight-year-old would spend hours pottering around, collecting ladybirds, making potions with bits of grass and flowers, until I interfered and got her digging and planting. It's not what she wanted to do and now she groans at the idea of going to the garden centre and watches the ripening strawberries only to make sure her sister doesn't eat the first red one before she does. She can't tell what a tulip or a daffodil is even though I drilled it into her when she was younger. I am really disappointed, mainly in myself, as I feel I selfishly tried to make her like and care about what I did.

I have now decided to make a conscious decision not to talk to her about gardening unless she asks. I am also trying to leave the younger one to her own devices. I find it hard, though, to stop myself. Only the other day I enlisted her help to dig up some lettuces we had grown. I turned away momentarily and when I looked back, she was jumping up and down on them, thoroughly enjoying the way they crunched. I turned away again, took a deep breath, counted to ten and thought, this is the perfect illustration of why we shouldn't encourage our children to garden.