What struck me most about the birthday party I attended July 29 was not the gifts – a Bartlett pear tree, a proclamation from the governor – or the fact that the guest of honor was not there (he was resting at his summer home in Provincetown). No, what stood out about this celebration, in honor of poet Stanley Kunitz’s centennial year, was what happened once the cake was cut.

Yes, the dedication ceremony on the grounds of the Tower Hill Botanic Garden in Boylston, Mass., was lovely. The leaves of the pear tree swayed in the breeze as the president of the Worcester County Botanical Society talked about Kunitz’s boyhood in the city of Worcester. He described the poet’s two forms of cultivation – gardening and writing – and the early losses Kunitz suffered. (His father committed suicide before he was born, and the stepfather he adored died unexpectedly.) As the president noted, Kunitz had “turned a sand dune into an oasis,” and not just at his home in Provincetown, Mass.

Then Debra Kang Dean, an accomplished poet in her own right, read Kunitz’s famous poem, “My Mother’s Pears.” The last stanza, as you may know, ends with “Make room/for the roots!‘’ my mother cries,/ “Dig the hole deeper.” In many ways, that’s what Kunitz has done all his life. Making room for both poems and younger poets.

After she’d finished reading, Ms. Kang Dean noted that,“A poet’s words travel. Poems become kind of a body, or an essense that we give body to with our voices.”

Once we’d moved inside for cake, it was easy to see how everyone at that celebration became part of a larger body. The room was full of people who wouldn’t normally spend time with one another: Young men with long ponytails and white-haired women in their bold red hats. Writers from the Worcester County Poetry Association – which co-sponsored the event – and children too young to hold a pencil. Poets who had studied with Kunitz, and people who knew only that he was a first-rate gardener.

But as each person took a slice of the cake – decorated to look like an open book – he or she offered a tribute to Kunitz, or a related story. One woman talked about a teacher of hers, who had studied with the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet years ago. He would read her work with a red pen in hand, and then draw a line through the last stanza. “The poem ends up here,” he would tell her. He expected excellence, but his approach was calm and evenhanded.

Imagine if everyone in the poetry world behaved the same way, rather than giving the kind of “swashbuckling” critiques and reviews so popular today. Does anything thrive when it’s  attacked with a machete?

But things do flourish, as one man explained, under the right circumstances. The anecdote he shared was of Kunitz two years ago, when, at 98, he seemed to be on his deathbed. Several of his closest friends had gathered around him, to say goodbye. Kunitz began talking about his garden, however, and the more he talked, the more he seemed to perk up. “Contact with soil and plants can be revivifying,” the man concluded.

The story I told was of watching Kunitz 10 years ago, when the New England Poetry Club had a cake in honor of his 90th birthday. He bent down to inspect the confection, a look of quiet satisfaction on his face. Then he picked up a knife and carefully cut around the 90 in the icing. He put that piece aside for himself, and then began slicing for others. It seemed so typical of the mentoring he had done over the years, as a founder of the Poets House in New York City and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. He had nurtured poets at the college level and as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress.

The last comment I heard, as I was leaving the party, was from the president of the Botanical Society, who was showing people pictures of Kunitz’s yard. “We need to see the poet in his garden, or the creator in his Eden,” he said.

In many ways, we already had.