Thanks to Robin A. Edgar, Charlotte campaign conversation facilitator, for submitting this inspiring entry.

The Supreme Court outlawed segregated schools in 1954, but it took three years for Southern states to comply-sort of. In Charlotte, dozens of black children volunteered to attend white schools but the school board rejected all but four. On Sept. 4, 1957, Dorothy Counts (Dot Counts-Scoggins today) walked down the hill to Harding High School.

Approaching a wall of screaming and spitting white students, she thought of what her father, Herman Counts, always told his family–”Hold your head high.” The wall parted to let her pass.

Woody Cooper was in the crowd. A good student, he was already accepted to The Citadel and his dad, a Charlotte policeman, told him, “Don’t get involved.” So Woody just stood and watched Dot come down the hill, walking right past him while his classmates cursed at her and called her names.

The photo that Don Sturkey took of that day for the Observer was eventually seen around the world. Over the years, when Woody looked at the picture, he realized that failing to help Dot that day was the same thing as hurling insults at her.

In 2006, after Woody’s Sunday School lesson about sins of omission, he told his class that he felt he had failed to do right by Dorothy Counts. The very next day, the Observer ran a story about Dorothy and Woody sent an e-mail to the reporter. The reporter forwarded it to Dot.

Dot and Woody, who are now friends, will be the guests of honor at the dedication of the Red Bench of Love in Charlotte’s Garden of Love and Forgiveness on June 10, 2010. We invited them to be the first to sit on this symbol from our four-year Campaign for Love & Forgiveness. We hope others will visit our Bench and Garden and take the time to find love and forgiveness in their hearts and lives as well.

Gardening can be an act of love and a healing endeavor. Gardening calls on us to honor the cycles of life and impermanence, and to be patient and nurturing. Gardens, too, can remind us of the great beauty of accepting what is.

The benefits of creating and tending a garden are many. A garden can provide a place of refuge, a place where we can contemplate things greater than ourselves, witness the extremes of nature, or seek the quiet of meditation.

Check out the campaign web site for ideas on creating a garden of love and forgiveness, including the symbolic meaning of plants, books, and web resources for further information. You may also want to watch a brief video featuring forgiveness researcher and author, Fred Luskin, Ph.D., and Rev. Lyndon Harris, former chaplain at St. Paul’s Chapel in lower Manhattan, discuss the creation of a garden of forgiveness after 9/11.

Quiet Gardens are the brainchild of Philip Roderick, an Anglican priest working in the Diocese of Oxford, England. According to the Quiet Garden Web site, at the age of 14, while on vacation with his family in South Wales, the seeds of this idea took root when Roderick took “an evening walk up a cliff path and was suddenly aware of a different reality, a depth to things of which he had previously been unaware.” The idea germinated for years, until September 1992, when the first garden opened.

The Quiet Garden Movement promotes the creation of garden spaces that encourage rest, prayer, and contemplation in private homes and gardens, retreat centers and local churches, inner city areas, and prisons. There are now 300 gardens around the world.

Gardens can be great places to rejuvenate the spirit, relieve stress, contemplate love and forgiveness or just “smell the roses.” Check out our section on creating a garden of love and forgiveness for additional ideas for gardens.

In Detroit, a Garden of Forgiveness was dedicated and blessed last month. Sparked by a magazine article about the Campaign for Love & Forgiveness film, The Power of Forgiveness, the Detroit FreePress reported that “Catholic sisters from the Dominican Center for Religious Development and priests and staff…created the place where people of all faiths can come to meditate, to reflect, to forgive.”

Another park, dedicated to the memory of Jakobi Ra Harris, a two-year-old hit and run victim, is also in the works in Detroit. Jakobi’s parents, Shamayim and James Harris, chose to forgive the man responsible for killing their son and to honor their son’s life with a park.

And, in Baltimore, a Garden of Forgiveness–part of the Northeast Interfaith Peace Garden–was dedicated last month with interfaith prayer, dance, and celebration. The Garden of Forgiveness grew out of conversations held as part of Maryland Public Television’s local Campaign for Love & Forgiveness effort.