The Holly Tree

I met Alexander Hamilton in 2013.

One day, as we took a long walk through the Meher Center, he told me a remarkable story. In fact, Hamilton himself asked me to write this story for him for the Glow, as he was not confident with his writing and was very pleased with how I write. I had imagined working with him to get every detail. Sadly that never happened. Hamilton died in 2016.

Sitting with Hamilton on the Center in Feb. 2016

While recounting Hamilton's story to a friend recently, while on a similar walk on the Center, my friend suddenly urged me to write it out. He became even more adamant as he discovered that few knew the story, or at least knew it correctly. And so that is what I'm going to do.

To begin, I'm going to tell a bit of what people do know, and then a lot of what they don't. The Meher Center was completed in 1944. However, Baba did not visit it for several years, finally coming in 1952, 1956, and 1958. Baba formally inaugurated the Center on his second trip in late July 1956. To commemorate the event, a tree was planted near the Barn. WECT television (then WMFD-TV) drove from Wilmington, NC for the ceremony and filmed it. It is from this filming that we have the picture below.

Still from film of tree planting ceremony by the Barn, July 1956

If you watch this film carefully, however, you will notice that Baba does not do anything to plant the tree. He does not touch the soil or a shovel. He simply makes a gesture of pleasure as Elizabeth holds the tree upright. Baba actually himself did not plant the tree. It was more like a staged event for the Wilmington news cameras, to have something to film.

Most people know that this tree, planted in 1956, did not live long. In fact it died very soon after. The tree was an oak or something like that.

What few people know is what I'm about to say. And here is where Alexander Hamilton's story, that he conveyed to me a few years ago, begins.

Hamilton graduated summa cum laude from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1980 with a degree in landscape architecture. While his career was real estate, when I met him he said he was also a horticulturalist and had many books on plants and trees. In that same year that he graduated, he came to the Center, I believe for the first time. Naturally he had an interest in the vegetation of the Center and quickly took an interest in the story that Baba had planted a tree there.

Thus he enthusiastically asked all about this tree when he met Kitty Davy. Kitty told him the tree Baba planted in the film had died shortly after it was planted, because it had never been watered and it was very hot in late July.

But as she spoke, it occurred to her, almost like an afterthought, that Baba had planted a second tree, and she did not know if it was alive or dead. Alexander became very excited, and asked her for careful directions where to look for it. She told him it was on the northeast* side of the Barn, the opposite side from where the tree that died had been.

Alex was struck by this, for there was no account of it anywhere. No one seemed to have any idea about it. As he pressed her, Kitty told him that she remembered they had put stones around the tiny plant in a circle so they could find it again. The fact that they had to mark the spot with stones suggests it may have only been a small sapling or cutting that was planted at the time, not a fully grown young tree such as in the movie of the one that died. With instructions from Kitty where to look, and the signs to look for, Alex went straight away to the Barn. Finding one small holly tree right where she had described, he got down and brushed the leaves away, and to his great surprise and delight found the rocks she had described in a circle around it.

Alex rushed back to Kitty's office with the news that he had discovered the tree. Upon hearing him describe the rocks and the position of the tree, Kitty said it was definitely the right one. She then went and told Elizabeth, as Alex waited. The timing of this event is important. For Elizabeth died the end of that very year. He was very fortunate she was there to corroborate what Kitty had said. On hearing the news Elizabeth immediately said there should be a sign made and set near the tree, and Elizabeth herself gave the words to be written on it, that Alex wrote down. "Meher Baba planted this Holly Tree May 20, 1952." Alex told Kitty and Elizabeth he would take care of seeing to the sign being made, and they suggested he go and talk to Malcom Clay, a Center worker who lived in Briarcliffe Acres with his wife Barbara and their children.

Alex arrived at Malcolm's only to find Malcolm and his family packing to leave on a trip. Malcolm had no time to make a sign, but he gave Alex permission to use his shop and tools while he was away. Left alone, with no carpentry skills, Alex simply did his best to make the sign, to go plant it where Elizabeth had said, and report to them that it was done.

In the picture below, taken by Alex in 1980, you can see not just the sign, but the small holly tree, and the circle of stones planted by Kitty that Alex had unearthed.

The Holly Tree planted by Baba in 1952, with sign by Alexander Hamilton

Before saying what became of this sign, this would be a good time to recount exactly what Alex told me about how the tree was planted, which he learned from Kitty. It is important for it explains why no one seemed to know about it, and that it was nearly forgotten about, even by Kitty herself.

The Story of the Holly Tree

To tell this story, we must go back 4 years earlier than the planting of the tree filmed by the Wilmington news station that died. We must go back to Baba's first visit to the Meher Center in 1952. On the last day of Baba's stay at the Center, on the morning of his departure for California on May 20, the Center was first fully closed down. Baba and his companions were to begin a long drive to Meher Mount in a caravan of two cars. Baba's car was driven by Elizabeth. Kitty was among the passengers in the second car to follow Baba. These two cars waited at the Center for all others to leave until it was deserted save for them. No one was to remain behind. Thus, in the end, there were only the two cars that would make the fateful trip, that they had no way to know would be cut short four days later in Prague, Oklahoma due to a major auto accident.

Alone on the Center, the final two cars passed the Kitchen and headed up the dirt road toward the highway, in a totally empty and locked up Meher Center. But as the car was about to pass the intersection that turns toward the Ocean, Baba suddenly asked Elizabeth to make a detour to the Barn. When they got to the Barn, Baba got out of the car, walked over to a spot by the Barn, followed by his disciples, and planted a holly tree on the northeast end with his own hands. Kitty and others then placed rocks around it to mark the spot, and then, after getting back in cars, the caravan then exited the Center and proceeded straight away toward California. The only people who witnessed this event were those in the two cars that later were involved in the accident, and both Kitty and Elizabeth were among them.

Alex's Strange Return to the Center

Now let us get back to the strange events that would follow in Alex's own story regarding the holly tree. Alex did not return to the Center for many years, and finally did in the mid or late 90s. Hence it had been over a decade since his planting the sign, inscribed with Elizabeth's words, using Malcolm's tools. Elizabeth Patterson had passed away in 1980, and Kitty had passed away in 1991. Alex was eager to visit the tree. But when he got there, there was no sign anymore. Finding scattered pieces of it, he figured it had been destroyed by falling branches in a hurricane, perhaps Hurricane Hugo (1989). But that's not the only surprise that awaited him, for the next thing he found disturbed him even more than the missing sign. A Center worker had recently cut the lower branches of the holly tree and unceremoniously tossed them in the woods nearby. It occurred to Alex that the Center did not know it was the tree Baba had planted. Alex collected the branches that had been cut and took them with him. We'll see later what he wound up doing with them.

Alex then went to Barbara Plews, who by then was running the Meher Center, and told her the story and asked her if he could make a new sign. She said she knew nothing of the fact, had no memory of the sign, and felt she would be relying solely on his word. The other workers apparently had no memory of it either and so she did not give him permission to recreate the sign. Hoping he could wake some memories in someone to prove his story, he went to Malcolm Clay. But Malcolm had no recollection of any of it. Alex found that some referred to the fact that Darwin Shaw had no memory of such a tree planting, though he was at the Center in 1952. However, Darwin had already left in his car for New York before Baba's caravan began its final exit and had no way to have known about it. He simply wasn't there.

This saddened and frustrated Alex. He felt very alone and a little hurt that his word was not trusted. Luckily, however, he still had a photo of the sign and tree that he had taken in 1980. In 2006 he published a very abbreviated account of his story, along with the photo, in Love Street Lamp Post (July 2006, p. 62).

On telling me all of this in 2015, Alex seemed very, very happy to finally find someone that entirely believed his account. Everything made sense to me, and on his showing me the tree, I was extremely enthusiastic. He told me he had taken the trimmed branches that he had gathered from the woods near the holly in the 90s, and had taken them to a carpenter in Massachusetts to carve into buttons. I asked him if he had any of these buttons left, and he said he did. I asked him for one and he sent the following note to me a few weeks later, along with my promised button from the tree.

The button on the left above is carved from the holly tree branches that Alex found cut and discarded in the 90s. The Glow image is simply a refrigerator magnet he got from Naosherwan.

So, while that essentially is the story of the Holly tree to the best of my memory, there are a couple of loose ends about which we can only speculate. Kitty and Elizabeth, who personally witnessed the planting, are gone. And now so is Alexander Hamilton, who seems to have been the only person determined enough to drag the story out of them in detail. So here are the questions.

Where did Baba get the holly he planted and when did he get it? About this we can only guess. There is a holly tree near the Lagoon cabin. As the caravan began from about that point, it seems possible Baba could have taken a clipping from this tree immediately before their departure. From the look of it, the Holly that is there certainly seems old enough to have been living in 1952. A little research reveals that one can plant a holly from a cutting. Did Baba take this cutting himself, without communicating what he was going to do? Such secrecy certainly seems within Baba's character.

The next question is, what is the significance of the holly, and what is the significance of planting it just before leaving, in fact the very last act he would do on the Center before parting on a trip that would culminate in his 'crucifixion' in America? Perhaps for a clue, Angie Mosteller (Christmas, 2008) has written of the holly's meaning:

Christians have identified a wealth of symbolism in [the holly's] form. The sharpness of the leaves help to recall the crown of thorns worn by Jesus; the red berries serve as a reminder of the drops of blood that were shed for salvation; and the shape of the leaves, which resemble flames, can serve to reveal God's burning love for His people. Combined with the fact that holly maintains its bright colors during the Christmas season, it naturally came to be associated with the Christian holiday.

Is this association to Christ's crucifixion a clue? We'll never know. But as if Baba were sending a sign that Alex's work was his own, and Alex dear to him and an inextrable part of this mysterious event's history, Alex passed away on Christmas morning, 2016. He'll be sorely missed.

Before he died, Alex literally asked me to help him write this story, and submit it to the Glow. I would have liked to have done so with him here to check and correct my every word. But in his absence, I have done my best. I think he would be very happy I did what I could. Jai Baba Alex Hamilton and thank you for your great research and efforts.

-- Chris Ott

Me standing by the holly tree on May 14, 2015. Photo by Megan Ott.

---

Notes: There is a short mention of this story, also attributed to Alexander Hamilton, in Meher Baba and the Trail of Tears, 2011, p. 72.

It is interesting that the inspiration to write this came on a walk on the Center that culminated at the tree site so close to Christmas. The holly berries were in full bloom.

According to the internet, holly trees live about 100 years, though in very good conditions can live somewhat longer. The holly was planted in May 1952, so almost 67 years ago. By rights it should live another 33 or a little longer. All things must pass.

* There is an error in the July 2006 issue of Love Street Lamp Post. It says the surviving holly tree is "at the northwest entrance to the Barn." It is in fact near the northeast entrance. This error was pointed out to me by Alex himself in a letter that I still have. 

See this update:

UPDATE ON BABA'S HOLLY TREE