SWEET SIMPLICITY
Scientist Diana Beresford-Kroeger is on a mission to make us hear nature’s message, PETER ROBB writes.
Diana Beresford-Kroeger’s mission is to educate people about the natural world. Now she wants people to live long enough to enjoy it.
The Sweetness of a Simple Life Diana Beresford-Kroeger Random House Canada
Ross Castle stands on the lower end of Lake Killarney in southwest Ireland. It’s the ancient home of the O’Donohue-Bearas, who were the designated teachers of the High Kings of Ireland back when Patrick was a preacher and not yet a saint.
It is the ancestral home of Diana Beresford-Kroeger, the wellknown Ottawa-area scientist-gardener. The roots go deep in that part of the world. And there are ancient lessons that can be learned if a wandering soul just stops for a minute and listens to the wind blowing through the trees.
Making sure we do listen has become Beresford-Kroeger’s life mission.
She remembers Ross Castle well. When she was a child, the castle was a ruin with walls down and pigs residing inside.
Today it has been restored by the Irish government, and that delights her and reminds her of tragedy.
When Diana was 11, her entire family was killed by a 21-year-old drunk driver.
“I was there filming this summer, and it was very emotional,” she said in an interview. “It was really weird for me because my whole family was killed when I was young.
“I’m the last holder of that banner, of that family. They died in a car crash.” She had stayed at home that fateful day.
“I was 11. They were all wiped out by a poor young boy who was 21 and he was drunk driving. When there was a funeral, the poor kid, he started screaming when he saw that I was left. He actually went insane, and he’s up in the hospital still.”
She was left, but not entirely alone.
“I was adopted then by a bachelor uncle. My uncle was a scholar. And he was a hurler. He hurled for all-Ireland, and he’d be as famous for hurling in Ireland as Wayne Gretzky is in Canada for hockey. It’s a cracking fast game.
“He was some fantastic man. Until he was 82 years old, he swam in the open sea every single day for five miles; summer, winter, even if he had to break the ice.
“He was known as Rocky Donohue. He was a scholar, too. He loved women, and he felt women should be educated and he pushed me. He pushed me to do anything I wanted to. He was marvellous.”
Marvellous, indeed, but then so is Diana Beresford-Kroeger a marvel.
She holds a PhD in molecular biology from University College Cork (her hometown). She also has a diploma in general surgery, which entitles her to be in an operating theatre helping the surgeon. And she finished first in science when she graduated in the 1960s. She is a Wings WorldQuest Fellow and a fellow of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society. She has published five other books and is currently involved in a documentary film project that is taking her to forests around the world and which will eventually be shown on CBC-TV’s The Nature of Things, among other venues.
And “I know how to use a shovel.” She sure does. She has built an arboretum called Carrigliath of rare and endangered species near Merrickville.
There’s one other thing about Diana. She is supremely confident.
That confidence comes from tragedy.
“It was the gift of losing my family. It’s an awful thing to say, really. I realized long ago that there was nobody left. And I realized that if I didn’t smarten up, nobody was going to help me smarten up.
“When I was 15 I went into a girlfriend’s house in Cork. And the woman was called Mrs. McGee. I waited at the door for her daughter, Betty, and Mrs. McGee shouted at me to stand in the hall because it was raining. And I opened the door and stood in the hall. Mrs. McGee came out and she had eight children and she looked me up and down and she said: ‘You know, Diana, you’re a good girl.’
“That’s the only praise I ever got in my childhood. I hung on to those words. I saw Betty a couple of years ago, and I told Betty ‘Your mother gave me a really big gift; she told me I was a good girl,’ and Betty started crying. She said to me, ‘ Diana, we had so much, and you had so little.’ ”
The other thing that has toughened her is science itself.
“I’ll tell you something: for a woman scientist to climb the ladder is 10 times, no, 100 times, more difficult than for a male scientist.”
And so she is ready for the fight. These days she wants to make sure that some of the knowledge she has gained over the years can be passed along to another generation.
“If we are going to lay a foundation for our children, I think we have to stop this terrible thing of consumerism because the planet can’t sustain it. The other thing is we’ve been cutting down the forest. and there is huge connection between climate change and the forests. We’ve got to do something about it.
“I hear, over and over again, my friends saying, ‘Oh well, my kids will sort this out.’ No ... we have to mentor them into a situation into where we can help them and hold their hands. It’s not good enough that they are going to be facing this huge financial burden.
“It’s also a matter of ethics. ... In a democracy we are responsible for ourselves.”
Her latest book, The Sweetness of a Simple Life, is full of advice for a healthy existence, she says.
She does caution that if readers have a health condition, they should consult their doctors and then follow their own “common sense.”
“I think that the basis of this book is go simple. Smile at yourself, smile at people. Back off who you are and this terrible rush you are in, and take time for yourself as a human being.
“The other thing is to shield yourself against cancers because the industrial food that is out there right now is really bad news, especially for babies and young people. And for people who want to reproduce, it’s just detrimental. The amount of autism is phenomenal. The problems with attention deficit disorder are unbelievable.
“If you eat good food, you will have a healthy body. We expect people to function on rubbish. That’s what I’ve tried to put in the book. And I’ve put it in little knowledge pockets, little knowledge bullets.” Bullets that fire information detailing everything from the kind of soap to use to the allure of seaweeds.
“This is how I live my life, based on all the knowledge I have. I’m really healthy. I have physicians consulting me. I am not exactly unknown in all kinds of places like Harvard.
“I live among the farmers, and I like the way they think. I want to live with people who have humility in their hearts. I like the smell of cow manure. I like how they are.”