Our Nashville Travels
We traveled to Nashville this past week for our son’s wedding. The rest of our family live here so we all traveled south. It was a wonderful wedding party at their home, modest but with a beautiful backyard garden where the ceremony and party was held. It was great to finally meet Marie’s family. We got along well and because Marie’s siblings are about the same age as ours, they had children about the same age and they all got along so well. Nashville was skirting the hurricane and we thought the worst with the weather but the weather was on our side. A beautiful evening with new friends and family.
Michael is a musician, a bass player for hire trying to make a life in the Music City. Marie works for the Harpeth Conservancy trying to preserve the Cumberland River watershed. A daunting task in a state that wants development. Harpeth River feeds the Cumberland River that feeds the Tennessee River that flows to the Mississippi River that we all know flow to the Gulf of Mexico, not the Gulf of America. That mentioned, everything is interconnected and Marie’s work involves this connectedness. I love this woman because she loves my son and I love how she is trying to make the world a better place. If they were to ever move back to Traverse City, she would find a place to care for the natural world.
While in Nashville both families visited the Nashville Zoo. It’s a big zoo with many beautiful plants that held my interest. My daughter had to remind me we were at a zoo not a botanical garden. I have to admit the caged animals really disturbed me. However, the gardens were wonderful, filled with familiar and unfamiliar plants; they should have named this a botanic garden/zoo. I saw a massive chinkapin oak that’s trunk measured about 30” across. It was 80’ tall with an spread about the same, saw Azaleas in bloom and bamboo 50’ tall. The zoo property was privately owned with a plantation house of the owners on the property and kept up. The property was gifted to the city and what a gift. To walk the zoo is about a 3 mile walk and the flora beauty is vast. Marie worked at the zoo a number of years ago and that is what piqued her interest in plants – because of this interest she became involved in preserving instead of development.
To circle back to our son Michael. He has been in Nashville for 12 years. He went there because that was where the music was. You could make it in a small town but he had higher goals. You go to Nashville and you can be spit out like a bad nut because you think you are good, then find out everyone in Nashville is good. Nashville ‘washes out’ most. Some stay and try to make a living, that’s Michael. He told me a few years ago of the 10,000 hour rule…not a new rule to me, but I let him explain. He has put in the time. Has he made it? Well, he is still there. But he is tired of the Nashville scene.
He wants to come back home and be a part of the fourth generation in the nursery business along with his older brother Matthew. They both have been raised with the love to have their hands in the dirt. Matthew since early teens worked with my crew landscaping and currently is with a local landscape company on a crew. Matthew is also an accomplished musician; both have played together since childhood so maybe they can keep the music flowing in Traverse City and be part of moving the Zimmerman name into the next generation in this beautiful town of Traverse City. I know someone who would be very proud of them and would be right there at their side.
