Lamy of Santa Fe

by Paul Horgan

of it all was to demonstrate what could be done to bring the graces and comforts of the earth to a land largely barren, rocky, and dry. To help his fellow citizens follow his example, he made them many gifts. On one of his westward journeys over the plains he brought horse-chestnut seeds in a pail of water all the way from Ohio, and a hundred sapling elms besides. He gave these to be planted in Santa Fe, and one day his old friend Mrs Flora Spiegelberg glanced out of her front window in Palace avenue and saw the archbishop planting with his own hands a pair of willow saplings at her front gate. When he was done with his spading, he blessed the young trees. In another year he saw English walnut trees planted in the city from his seeds. In another, a thousand fruit trees were set out in Santa Fe where there were so few. If the garden was his principal joy, he did not see it as his exclusively. The pleasure it gave to visitors rewarded him, and what it had to offer in other ways was at the disposal of those who needed it. One day Sister Blandina, from the hospital nearby, looked over the wall. She saw beds of cabbages, turnips, carrots. In the hospital there were seventy-two patients, thirty-five orphans, and sixteen nuns who had not “a handful of vegetables” in their kitchen. The garden was quiet —nobody there. Blandina “made one athletic spring,” with heavy skirts and rosary flying, vaulted over the wall and landed near the cabbage patch. There in haste she threw over the w...