By Betsey Norgard<\/p>\n
![\"Herb](\"http:\/\/www.augsburg.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/3\/2012\/10\/chilstrom.jpg\" "\\"chilstrom\\"")
At age 77, Herb Chilstrom \u201954 got an offer he couldn\u2019t refuse. The retired ELCA presiding bishop was invited to serve as interim director of the Linnaeus Arboretum at Gustavus Adolphus College while its director is overseas for a year. The transition from Chilstrom\u2019s 50-plus years as pastor and bishop to administrative gardener, he tells his friends, was easy: \u201cI\u2019m going from tending flocks to tending phlox.\u201d<\/p>\n
Chilstrom gained an appreciation and love for gardening from his mother, a gardener ahead of her time who, along with her husband, put organically grown food on their table. He pursued that interest in retirement when he studied to become a master gardener.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt turned out to be one of the most enjoyable educational experiences I\u2019ve ever had,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
When the Chilstroms moved to a townhome in St. Peter, Minn., Herb volunteered his services to the arboretum. For seven years he nurtured flowerbeds back to blooming beauty and created a vegetable garden behind the restored settlers\u2019 cabin\u2014which was a necessity for every settler, as well as his own family. During this time the arboretum began to restore more than 80 acres back to its native prairie. Now as interim director, he has enjoyed launching \u201cThe Linnaeus Order of Nasturtiums,\u201d a cadre of volunteers who tend the arboretum\u2019s flora. Mostly retirees, the order has \u201ctaken off like gangbusters,\u201d Chilstrom says. Despite the initiation, that is, which requires each volunteer to eat a nasturtium blossom laced with cream cheese.<\/p>\n
\u201cPeople are almost begging to get into the order,\u201d says Chilstrom. He has recruited 20 volunteers in two months, and all have passed the initiation. For Chilstrom, this second \u201ccalling\u201d also has theological roots. He says that while Lutherans consider Christ\u2019s life, death, and resurrection in the Second Article of the Creed as the heart of Christian faith, \u201cwe may have emphasized it to the point where we don\u2019t appreciate as much as we should the First Article, about creation as the gift of God.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cBeing involved in a place like the arboretum,\u201d Chilstrom continues, \u201cgives me a chance to create some balance, to be committed to making this place as beautiful as it can be in a world that is quite broken, where we don\u2019t appreciate the gifts of nature, and where there\u2019s so much desecration of the environment.\u201d<\/p>\n
It\u2019s also a chance for some historical reflection. Chilstrom recounts how so many settlers, including his great-grandparents, arrived in Minnesota penniless and began breaking up the prairie, with disregard for Native peoples and their land. \u201cNow when we recapture part of that into native prairie, we are helping people step back and think about what it was like for Native Americans to live here, how they survived in that setting, and the beauty of the prairie,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
In sum, Chilstrom says, \u201cI feel that in my retirement I\u2019ve been uniquely blessed to be located in a place like this where I can think about some of these good things that are important to us.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
By Betsey Norgard At age 77, Herb Chilstrom \u201954 got an offer he couldn\u2019t refuse. The retired ELCA presiding bishop was invited to serve as interim director of the Linnaeus Arboretum at Gustavus Adolphus College while its director is overseas for a year. The transition from Chilstrom\u2019s 50-plus years as pastor and bishop to administrative <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[63,45],"class_list":["post-576","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-featured-stories","tag-auggie-voices","tag-fall-2009"],"wps_subtitle":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.augsburg.edu\/now\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/576","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.augsburg.edu\/now\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.augsburg.edu\/now\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.augsburg.edu\/now\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.augsburg.edu\/now\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=576"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.augsburg.edu\/now\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/576\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7825,"href":"https:\/\/www.augsburg.edu\/now\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/576\/revisions\/7825"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.augsburg.edu\/now\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=576"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.augsburg.edu\/now\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=576"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.augsburg.edu\/now\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=576"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}