Chat & Photos

Ade Bethune 1914 - 2002

May 6, 2002, Jane McLaughlin

Just a short note to let you know in case you have not otherwise
read it. Sunday's Boston paper carried an obituary for Ade Bethune.

I could send you a copy if you like.

May 6, 2002, John Stokes, Mary's Gardens

I am grieved to learn of Ade Bethune's death.  Thanks so much for
letting me know about it right away.  Yes, please send me a copy
of the "Boston Globe" obituary.

I regret she was unable to come to the 100th Anniversary mass, and
50th jubilee of Our Lady's Garden, at St. Joseph's in 1982, to
which I invited her so she might see the bishop's blessing of her
St. Joseph, Garden Workman statue in the south Bell Tower garden.
It would have been memorable if the three of us could have talked
together.

As I write, I recall my visit to the garden on the Feast of St.
Joseph, Workman on May 1st one year, when I found St. Joseph's
Bells (Snowflakes, Leucoium vernum) just blooming around her St.
Joseph's statue.  While these flowers were named for their
characteristic blooming in many places in Europe at the time of
March the Feast of St. Joseph; due to the sea-delayed spring in
Woods Hole they were blooming there for the feast of St. Joseph,
Workman.  (They may be blooming right now.)

My friendship with Ade goes back to pre-Mary's Gardens days.  I
first knew of her from her drawings in Dorothy Day's "Catholic
Worker" newspaper each month, and then we became acquainted at
annual meetings of The Catholic Art Association, of which she was
Secretary, and also Editor of the Association's "Catholic Art
Quarterly".  She published one of my earliest Mary Garden
articles, "Honoring Mary With God's Artistry", in the Christmas,
1952, Quarterly - for which we used her "Virgin & Child" needlework
design, from the same issue, as illustration for the reprint).

Then, at an annual meeting of the CAA in Albany in 1955 (?) she
offered to do a garden sculpture for us - Mary, Seat of Wisdom -
which we commissioned, and she did for us the following summer in
Belgium; and which we had reproduced in ceramic stoneware and sold
some 100 copies (in the days when we sold things).  See "In Search
of a Mary Garden Statue".  Several years later she did the
companion St. Joseph, Garden Workman statue for us.  See 
"St. Joseph, Patron of Mary's Gardeners."

She was thus one of our esteemed early Mary's Gardens Associates.
We resumed communication when she got on e-mail several years ago.

In this collaboration we had adjoining booths of her St Leo's Shop
(liturgical arts) and Mary's Gardens at two of the annual
week-long conventions of the National Liturgical Convention.

I used to visit her each summer when in Rhode Island, and enjoyed
her lovely Mary Garden there, with both her statues.

  

Ade was very much opposed to our ostentatious U.S. funerals, and
over 50 years ago crafted her own simple wooden coffin, which
served ("unannounced") as a chest in the entrance hall of her
Newport home - which I recall at this time with much poignancy.