ARGONAUT Warren Hinckle, Editor Volume 141 NO. 4218, April, 1996

This proposed garden, its cultural programs, symbolic plantings, digital capabilities and its maintenance, can be designed, developed, and maintained in collaboration with citywide community research mentoring teams, comprised of students parents, educators, business people, and other interested individuals or groups.

These Teams, will play an integral role in the garden's design development, content, creation, digital links, and maintenance. For example, every sixth grader in San Francisco's studies ancient Mesopotamia and this garden could become a model site for exciting and relevant project based learning. Using state-of-the-art digital technologies, the garden can be linked to the Main Library and its branches, the Asian Art Museum, the public school system, the Oriental Art Institute of Chicago, and institutions in the Middle East.

The various aspects of Assyrian Culture and ecology represented in this garden include:
• A Digital Entry Garden integrating a Ziggurat, a typical Assyrian architectural form, a wheel, which was first invented by the Assyrians, and changing multimedia digital design displays which can become an interactive "frieze" developed by the Community Research Mentoring Teams.
• Two water areas representing the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers.
• Herringbone pavers between the two "rivers" (a typical Assyrian pattern)
• The existing statue of Ashurbanipal, king of Assryia, who developed the first library.
• A suggested plant list includes pomegranate and date palms signifying the "tree of life", reeds which were first used as a stylus in the wet clay for the first written language called cuneiform, Lotus signifying "eternal life." Also typical planting from Mesopotamia were grapes, barley, onions, garlic, poppies, daises, anemone, fig, and quince.
• The existing sycamores (which can be retained throughout the total open space as part of this plan) signify "genius" because the ancient Greek Philosophers used to sit under them and philosophize.

The elements for this garden concept were developed with Narsai David, Dr. Lincoln Malik, Fred Parhad, and Bill Lazar. Special thanks to Ruth Kadish, Jim Chappell, and Noah Griffin.