Susan Ide Memorial Garden

Making plans for Susan's Garden

A garden in memory of Susan Ide - Poet, Teacher and Friend

Susan Rusmisel Ide was a beloved faculty member at Keystone College for more than ten years. Her contributions to the campus community were far -reaching and deep-it’s hard to imagine anyone touching so many lives in such uplifting and genuine ways.

Susan’s death from breast cancer in 1993 left us with an enormous sense of loss, and the search to honor and celebrate her life was a difficult one. However, I believe we found just the right ways: a garden and poetry collection.

‘Susan’s Garden,’ located in the center of the Keystone College campus, celebrates that part of her life committed to nature. She lived on a mountain In the middle of 500 acres of red oak and shale, deer and bears, snakes and squirrels.

Last, Susan was committed to teaching and to her students. Bringing her poems together in this collection allows all of us-and we were all her students -to remember, to celebrate, and to honor her for all that she gave to us throughout her life.

Charlotte Ravaioli ........Dean of the College

It was our honor to be asked to design and construct a garden in memory of Susan.

The Garden is centrally located in the main campus at Keystone college , PA.

We have quite ambitious plans....

So far we have made an initial planting and created a walk way to the garden.

We will use this web page to show you our progress and and give you all the information you need if you would like to contribute to this worthy cause

KEEP RETURNING

We choose a central area to make something very special

This picure shows a bed with 3 honeysuckles and some "motheaten" shrubs

It is here that our rock garden was constructed

Thanks Paul Epsom , Greystone Gardens

Donations for upkeep and development of Susan's Garden

can be sent to

Keystone College

Susan's Garden

La Plume PA 18411

Structure

The importance of winter

Is the revelation of structure.

Naked oaks, maples, sycamores, ash

Delineate black latticework and lace;

Roadside weeds (stripped to the bone,

Bleached of green) stripe and hatch.

Mountain outlines and rock contours

Slope stark and sharp.

Even shadows are clear and elegant

Angles and curves

Against white sky and snowscape.

Now at the nadir of the year

Who of us, sitting among cards and letters,

Musing alone in the week of Christmas,

Does not sense in the shadow

Before us on the floor

The armature beneath our clay,

And, facing the shape in the dark window,

Does not contemplate

The framework of our lives?

December compels this morphology:

Ah, let us admire the design.