Plant Your Flag
Every year for the past twelve years, volunteers from the Massachusetts’ Military Heroes Fund gather on the Boston Common to create a massive flag garden installation for Memorial Day. The Common was established in 1634; it is the oldest city park in America. In keeping with Boston’s misplaced snobbery, this basically makes it the only park in America. Golden Gate, what? Central who? Nevah heard of ‘em.
The Common is a 50-acre sprawl with an ice skating pavilion, bandstand, and several historical markers, including the massive Soldiers and Sailors’ Monument that stands atop a short hill about half way through the Common. From the monument, the Common funnels out in a patchwork of generous grassy expanses. The Heroes Fund flag garden begins just on the other side of this monument. Visitors crest to the top and are greeted with a display of 37,000 American flags, one for every service person from Massachusetts who paid the ultimate sacrifice from The Revolutionary War to present day.
The flags spill out over the hillside in soft, undulating waves bringing to mind the “waves of grain” lyric in America’s celebratory hymn. It also evokes other types of waves: pain, blood; young men, barely out of boyhood, drifting together in lines of deadly symmetry across fields and plains and punishing desert landscapes. Anyone unmoved by this spectacle is a card carrying cyborg.
I’ve made an effort to visit the installation most years—2020 scuttled the garden for obvious reasons. The lives marked by some of those flags belonged to individuals fighting on April 19, 1775 just twenty-six miles west of this lovely, quiet city park. The garden brings the immense scope of that into sharp focus. I imagine one of these somewhere in each state, a tribute to what is most precious and sacred about life, but also a cautionary tale about the voracious appetite of war.
Hundreds of volunteers work together to create the garden. The flags are placed with such care and precision—the spacing, the height, the evenness of rows—that it’s clearly a task that demands attention and conscientiousness. In this way, the flags themselves stop being symbols of a country or a set of ideals and, instead, become unique pieces, individuals once again.
