The Gardening Charter

An email arrived last week from Medfield's Town Administrator (we don’t have ‘City Managers’ or ‘Mayors’, just a Board of Selectmen and an appointed official who oversees our various town departments).  Attached to the email was a letter saying the Board of Selectmen had decided to “review the structure, purpose, and prior years’ work for all appointed Boards and Committees” before reappointing anyone for the coming year.  Attached to it was a two-page questionnaire.

Medfield has 45 Committees; 30 of them ‘Special Committees’, and another fifteen created by the Town Charter. These range from one to ‘Study Memorials’ to a ‘Permanent Planning and Building Committee’. 

Tucked somewhere in the middle of the list is the Community Gardens Committee.  It so happens that Betty and I are on that Committee.  We are, truth be told, its only members and have been so for almost ten years.  We came to be on the Committee because, in 2009, we complained to a Selectman that the Community Garden was in a state of disarray.  We charged the Garden was run by a clique that allocated multiple plots to itself while allowing the others to lie fallow. Spigots leaked or were disconnected.  Weeds were everywhere.  Chaos ruled.

A week later, the Town Clerk asked us to come to the Medfield Town House (we also don’t have a Town Hall, just a ‘Town House’) to be sworn in as members of the Community Gardens Committee (we had no idea there was a ‘Committee’).  After we had been sworn in, we asked when the Committee would next meet.  The Town Clerk shook her head.  “You decide.  They all quit.”

The garden seems to run fairly well

In the intervening years, we have run the garden as best we can.  Our names appear annually in the Town Yearbook, but that is the extent to which anyone acknowledges we hold some official title (I make a point of signing all Community-Garden-related emails ‘Garden Ogre’).

So, it came as a surprise we needed to write a ‘Charter’ for the Committee, and that the Charter should include our “long-term objective or purpose”, “goals for the year”, and “dates and deliverables for committee work”.  In return, the Selectmen would, ominously, “determine if the Committee should continue to exist” and “identify which members wish to continue on the Committee”.

So, I sat down to fill out the questionnaire, starting with answering “Question 1: Should this Committee continue to exist?’  I thought long and hard about it, and finally wrote, “The Community Garden exists only because the Town considers a vegetable garden, open to all interested residents and located on Town land, to be a worthwhile use of such land and a benefit that makes the town a more appealing community in which to live.  The Community Gardens Committee, in turn, exists to relieve the Town of the expense and manpower that would otherwise be required to perform the tasks outlined in the Charter.”

Steal from the best,
I always say...

From there, all I had to do was write the ‘Charter’ I had so blithely referenced.  What, exactly, should a Charter chart?  I decided to use as my reference point a document from 1215 called the ‘Great Charter’ or, as they said in those days, the ‘Magna Carta’.  When you read that 804-year-old bit of statecraft, you come to understand it is a ‘how-to-govern’ manual.  For example, “No constable may compel a knight to pay money for castle-guard if the knight is willing to undertake the guard in person, or with reasonable excuse to supply some other fit man to do it.” Simple, clear, to the point. 

So, I changed the wording somewhat, but otherwise came up with twelve things the Community Gardens Committee is supposed to do; starting with making certain everyone in town knows in February and March plot are available, and concluding with making certain the water gets turned off at the end of October.  I was tempted to include something about droit de seigneur just to see if anyone was reading my responses but, sadly, Betty overruled me.

Once upon a time we all lined up
outside the Town House to get a plot

Writing the Charter, in turn, clarified my understanding of what is involved in running the Community Garden and how it has changed.  Once upon a time, interested gardeners lined up outside the Town House on one specified day and a town employee took money and assigned plots.  Until a few years ago, a group of Department of Public Works employees spent an afternoon staking out the gardens and, once every two weeks, a town tractor mowed the garden’s perimeter.  Now, all these tasks are done by volunteers.

The 2008 plot assignment map Betty and I inherited from the Committee showed a garden with a total of 40 plots, but just 27 gardeners, many with multiple plots, and five gardens that were never taken (and, if memory serves, another half dozen that were abandoned mid-season).  This year, 83 individuals or families are in 73 plots of varying sizes.  Next year, if all goes well, there will be 20 new plots in an annex.  Either interest in gardening has grown exponentially in the last decade, or we’ve fulfilled a need that was not being met.

The questionnaire I filled out will go into a pile along with responses from the other 44 Committees.  Will the Community Gardens Committee continue to exist in 2020?  Time will tell.  Will Betty and I continue to chair it?  I hope so.  I’ve gotten to enjoy signing memos as the ‘Garden Ogre’.

"January, February, March, March, March, March, July..."

Iris cristata and Trilliums
at the end of May?

This morning I paused a moment to admire the trilliums and iris cristata blooming at the edge of our back patio. I sniffed the perfume of the lilac in full glory along the driveway.  And I admired the tenacious hellebores that have continued to flower since the snow melted in early March.

The problem is, I did all these things this morning, and this morning is May 29. The iris and lilac should have ceased blooming three weeks ago. The hellebore should have gone dormant by now. 

Yes, I know I'm lucky...but 49 degrees?

Oh, and the temperature outside is 49 degrees.  And, according to this morning’s Globe, it has rained 22 out of the first 29 days of the month (and more rain is expected today).

There’s a cute joke about the weather on Cape Cod: that monthly calendars have headers that read, ‘January, February, March, March, March, March, July…’. And, it has the ring of truth: the cold Atlantic waters keep the region’s spring weather cool and damp.  But I live in the temperate Boston suburbs, 60 miles from Cape Cod.  What’s going on?

The lilacs ought to have passed by now

The meteorological explanation is a persistent high-pressure system that keep giving us Canadian-grade weather, coupled with a recalcitrant jet stream and brewing El Nino.  Two hundred miles south, Pennsylvania and Maryland are being rocked by thunderstorms, and further west and south, there are tornadoes and flooding.  So, we ought to (and do) count ourselves lucky.

But then I go visit our vegetable garden… or what ought to be our vegetable garden.  By the end of May we should be up to our knees in lettuce and spinach.  We should be picking peas and coaxing green beans. Instead, our garden looks like we planted it last week – which is also not too far from the truth. 

Phlox at the end of May?

Thus far we have picked exactly nothing from a 600-square-foot plot, because everything is too cold and too wet.  This past weekend, when the temperature briefly got above 80 degrees for an afternoon, we planted the tomatoes we purchased three weeks ago. Now, I fear the plants will curl up and wither from the cold.  Neither the corn nor the squash seeds we planted ten days ago have germinated.  ‘Knee high by the Fourth of July’?  We’re not holding our breath.

I realize these are ‘high-class problems’.  “Awww, your garden isn’t producing.  Would you like to come bail out my basement or cut up the tree on my roof?”

The old saw is that ‘If you’re not killing plants, you’re not gardening’.  I guess I’d prefer to see my plants croak the usual way: because I over-watered them, stepped on them, or failed to give them the proper nutrients.  Freezing to death at the end of May?  Now that’s just cruel…

In Our Garden, 2019 Is Leap Year

The gardening world is rich with mnemonics; simple rhyming catchphrases that help you remember important rules.  How much sunlight does a vegetable need?  “Leaf, root, flower, fruit” tells you everything you need to know.  ‘Leaf’ vegetables like lettuce need the least light, ‘fruit’ ones need most.

The daffodils we planted by the road
at the front of our house have doubled

The one I’m pondering at the start of the 2019 gardening season is “sleep, creep, leap”.  It’s a powerful truth: yielding to the desire for ‘instant gratification’ is never in a gardener’s best interest.  Instead, cultivate patience.  If you plant a tree, shrub, or perennial, expect that its first year will be one of little apparent growth – it sleeps.  Whatever you put in the ground is busy establishing a root system and acclimating itself to a new, alien environment.

Twelve months pass.  That yearling plant creeps.  It almost grudgingly displays a modicum of visible growth, but there is still a painful, yawning space between it and its nearest brethren.  It is not until the third – or even fourth year – that the plant begins to fill its appointed space, and a garden begins to look like, well, a garden.

The leucothoe, heuchera,
and azalea now fill the bed

It is also in that second year that Type-A-personality gardeners fall into the trap of overbuying and over-planting.  If a rhododendron’s tag says to plant specimens four feet apart, the impatient gardeners shrinks that spacing to three or even two feet.  For a year or two, the homeowner achieves the illusion of an ‘instant garden’.  By the third year, plants are getting in one another’s way.  By the fifth year, shrubs that ought to be healthy are instead dying of diseases that should be collectively be labeled, ‘willful ignorance’.  (Several decades ago, we acquired a house with such a landscape.  A year into our ownership, we pulled our hundreds of dollars of yellowing shrubs with underdeveloped roots starved for space.)

Betty and I moved into our new home in early April 2015.  Our intention had been to quickly install some 200 perennials lovingly divided and potted up from our ‘old garden’ and bring in a full retinue of new trees and shrubs perfect for the site.  Long before the first frost, we would have the elements of our new garden on the half-acre (of our one-and-a-half acres) we planned to cultivate. 

Magnolia 'Elizabeth' went
from a few dozen blooms
to more than a hundred

Instead, in mid-April, we discovered we had no viable soil in the area we intended to make our garden.   A year of construction vehicles on the site, the dispersal of ‘spoils’ from digging the foundation and basement, and the removal of some 40 end-of-life pines meant that gardening would have to be preceded by the removal of 950 cubic yards of what we came to call ‘builders’crud’ and replace it with a like volume of loam.  Moreover, moles and voles had consumed the roots of three-quarters of our transplanted stock.

It took until mid-summer to complete the site preparation; nothing went into the ground during the critical April through June period.  By the end of September, we had planted just eight trees, 50 or so perennials, and perhaps a dozen shrubs.  We added 1800 bulbs in late October.  Our start was so late that 2015 didn’t even merit being called the ‘sleep’ phase; most of the plants we wanted were still in nurseries.

The hyacinths we planted along the
sidewalk emerge stronger each year

In the following two years we added more trees and several dozen shrubs.  We began planting ground covers, added plants –primarily native perennials – to the spaces between trees and shrubs.  And, yes, more bulbs went into the ground, bringing our total to more than 4,000.  Those were our ‘sleep’ years.  I remember looking out on our back patio where we had planted more than a hundred native perennials a year earlier.  I kept thinking that, by now, it ought to be a scene of riotous color and texture.  Instead, it was a series of discrete, small plants.  Nothing touching, much less overlapping.

Our ‘creep’ year was 2018.  The ‘ephemerals’ – especially the Virginia bluebells – flowered and proliferated.   Our hostas unfurled their first leaves before the end of April.  The dicentra grew vigorously and bloomed into July.  Our shrubs – notably the small iteas and fothergillas – put up exuberant spikes of white flowers, and our leucothoes nearly doubled in size.

The individual plugs of
bearberry have merged into
a mat, helping prevent weeds

This spring we are seeing the telltale signs that 2019 is our ‘leap’ year.  The dozen plugs of bearberry we planted in 2016 merged over the winter into a continuous cover that will help keep weeds under control in one section of the garden.  Eight, gallon pots of chrysanthemum daisies planted on three-foot centers in 2017 will merge this season into a continuous mass of long-blooming color.  A handful of native asters we planted in 2016 to help keep soil in place at the edge of our wetlands have proliferated to the point we now need to stop their plan for world dominance.

It is the trees and shrubs, though that provide the greatest satisfaction.  Only a year ago, our yellow magnolia ‘Elizabeth’ had scarcely two dozen blooms in late April.  This morning I stopped counting at a hundred.  We planted many of our native shrubs in groups of three, typically on four-foot centers.  As they begin greening up this year, it is growing difficult to know which branches below to what shrub.

The best news is that the ‘leap’ phase is not just a one-year event.  Rather, it is the first tangible – and continuing – evidence of our land’s evolution from a ‘collection of plants’ into a coherent garden.

Spring Dreams, Summer Realities

As long as there are people like Betty around, the horticultural magazine business will prosper.  No fewer that four publications arrive each month by subscription, and several others find their way over the transom unbidden.  Each gets scrutinized for interesting new plants as well as for anecdotal gardening information.

           

The gardening magazine industry
is alive and well

Oddly, these magazines aren’t always read when they first arrive.  Rather, they accumulate until the (hopefully) last snow of the season is melting.  Then, they’re brought out and savored like a fine wine (and are occasionally accompanied by a glass of same or a rich dark chocolate).  This is a perfect time of year for such an activity: nothing is yet growing, and the garden palette is nothing but grays and browns.  The garden centers and nurseries are just getting their earliest spring stock.  In the New England gardening world, all things are still possible in early April.

It takes more than a pretty face to sell a plant to my wife.  First, with a commitment to creating a garden that is 95% native, lots of plants are rejected even though they’re cute as a button.  She flips past most of the Asian imports and focuses on cultivars with their roots – figuratively and literally – in North America. 

What did this Echinacea give up to
get such a prolific bloom?

Even native plants are subject to scrutiny.  That new coneflower with the bright green center (most Echinacea eyes are brown)?  It certainly looks attractive, but the description says it ‘matures to a bushy mound with a ratio of blossoms to foliage of nearly 1:1.’   The green center can be a naturally occurring mutation encouraged by good propagation.  However, plants can’t expend that much energy in creating blooms without giving up something.  What did the breeder lose in gaining all those flowers?  If it is pollen, the plant will be pretty for humans to admire, but of no use to pollinating insects.  She says she’ll look at it, but the perennial had better be covered with bees if it is to go home with us.

This is the 'traditional' Calycanthus,
not many flowers but oh, that scent!

Similarly, Carolina allspice, also known as sweetshrub (Calycanthus floridus), has undergone a metamorphosis.  A few decades ago it was a rangy green shrub with dull reddish-brown flowers that bloomed prolifically in the spring and sporadically in the summer.  But oh, that scent.  You closed your eyes, inhaled, and you were transported to a South Seas island.  

Propagators have bred for prettier
flowers, but lost much of the scent

Then, the breeders got busy.  More compact cultivars were introduced and, even better, the flowers became brighter, redder, and near-continuous. We have three ‘original’ specimens on our property and were ready to add more until Betty stopped to sniff the new specimens at a garden center.  That was when she discovered plant breeders had been willing to give up scent to get more flowers.  A plant has ‘x’ amount of energy to give over to flower production to attract pollinators.  The ‘old’ Calycanthus wasn’t such a great bloomer, but what blooms it had were pollinator magnets.  The new plants?  Prettier to look at, but the scent was nothing special.  We’ll stay with what we have.

Betony 'Summer Crush' is at the top
of Betty's 'to-buy' list

But there’s a double blue circle drawn around a new betony offering pink and white blooms.  Betony (Stachys) is a native that found its way into our garden two years ago. Last year, our five plants exploded with a burst of foot-high flower stalks that attracted every bee and butterfly in a mile radius.  The purple blooms were attractive, but we already have a lot of purple in our early summer garden, and Betty was hesitant to plant ‘more of the same’, especially given that our betony was spreading nicely on its own.  The new cultivar, ‘Summer Crush’ is at the top of her ‘to buy’ list.

Our garden continues to grow and mature each year, and we have a budget to bring in new plants that complement what we have and fill in the shrinking blank spots in our canvas.  The barrier to entry is getting very high, but those gardening magazines help get us ready to be discerning consumers when the nurseries begin filling with their new offerings.

Where Does the Boston Flower Show Go From Here?

Me, way back when.  You
can double-click on the
photos to see a slideshow.

Before I go further, I need to say I have a strong interest the Boston Flower and Garden Show (BF&GS), as well as its predecessor, the New England Spring Flower Show (NESFS).  It’s an emotional investment: I ran the Massachusetts Horticultural Society’s activities at the BF&GS for three years, and helped build flower show exhibits for several years prior to that.  This essay’s title is intended to pose two questions; one geographical and the other philosophical.  Both are hard problems with no easy answers.

The old Bayside Expo Center

I’ll start with location.  After a peripatetic existence in the 1950s and 1960s, the ‘old’ New England Spring Flower Show settled into a long run at the Bayside Exposition Center in Dorchester, six miles south of Boston’s Financial District.  The facility, a failed shopping mall, leaked and was abysmally maintained.  But it was cavernous and had location in its favor: just off the Southeast Expressway with thousands of adjacent, reasonably-priced parking spaces (attractive for suburbanites), and walking distance from the MBTA Red Line (convenient for city dwellers).  

The move to the Seaport World Trade Center was a compromise.  At roughly 120,000 square feet, it was less than half the size of Bayside, but Bayside was shutting down.  The Paragon Group (the group sponsoring the BF&GS) could not guarantee the hotel bookings necessary to secure the use of the Boston Convention and Exposition Center (BCEC).  Seaport became, quite literally, the only game in town.  The other facilities were too small or not available.

Two years ago this was a surface
parking lot across from Seaport.  I 
took this photo on the show's last day.

In 2010, the first year of the Seaport venue, things went reasonably well.  Seaport (itself a repurposed and re-built cruise ship terminal) was a hotel and office complex amid a sea of cheap, surface-level parking lots.  Mass Hort had no problems drawing floral designers, amateur horticulturalists, and volunteers for the show; and show attendees found ample, reasonably-priced parking  Within two years, though, the Seaport District began its transformation into an office and residential district.  Within six years, the cost to park for a few hours soared from $11 to $36 and traffic bogged down in a morass of lane closures.

Then, last year, Fidelity Investments announced it would close Seaport’s exhibition hall in mid-2020.  Moving the show became not an option but, rather, a necessity. 

Seaport's footprint, while hardly
ideal, is better than alternatives

Where can it go? In my opinion, suburban Gillette Stadium’s field house at just 80,000 square feet, is too small for the show.  The Back Bay’s Hynes Convention Center has 150,000 square feet of space, but it is on two floors and has the same access issues as Seaport.  BCEC is unlikely to make an exception to its hotel/night formula.  Absent a mall closing down (always a possibility in the current retail landscape) or a well-situated warehouse becoming vacant, the alternative is to relocate the Boston Flower and Garden Show elsewhere in New England.

Is there still a demand?

Which goes to the heart of the second question: is there still a demand for a late-winter flower and garden show?  Having been to Philadelphia and being acquainted with the Maine Flower Show in Portland, I can easily argue there is an audience.  But the Philadelphia Flower Show, run since 1829 by the powerhouse Pennsylvania Horticultural Society, is a sensual extravaganza that draws a quarter million attendees from the northeast and mid-Atlantic states.  It will go on as long as Penn Hort is around.  Now in just its third year, the Maine Flower Show is intimate by design and is profitable on 50,000 attendees.  Although held at the end of March, it is in a location where nothing will be green for at least another six or eight weeks.

Waiting to get into the New England
Spring Flower Show in the 1950s

I cannot help but feel – and this is personal opinion – that ‘flower shows’ in northern urban centers have been bypassed by time and technology. In 1960, the ‘winter vacation’ was the province of the wealthy.  Today, for $79, Jet Blue will fly a Bostonian to Ft. Myers or Ft. Lauderdale, where the flowers and greenery don’t have to be forced and six hours of artificial spring isn’t followed by stepping into icy puddles accompanied by a blast of 35° wind.

Mass Hort's exhibit in 2012.
Everything was in bloom.

Also, in my opinion, the 2019 BF&GS was a dispiriting affair.  I know landscape exhibits; I know what it takes to force plants to be fully in leaf and flowering for mid-March: it requires a large greenhouse heated to 80° for as long as three months and a lot of tender loving care for thousands of plants.  Yet, at this year's show, I walked by one exhibit by a ‘major’ landscaper in which dozens of azaleas were barely leafed out and not a single one was in flower.  To me, it was inexcusable - or cheap (forced plants must be returned to those same greenhouses until May).  Many other exhibits consisted more of stone than of plants ("It don't cost a dime to force stone," an exhibitor once told me).  And, if the landscapers aren’t putting their hearts into it, why should a visitor pay $20?

Amateur horticulture at the 2019
flower shoe was a high point...

Mass Hort wisely moved its entry day for amateur horticulture to Sunday from Monday to avoid fighting Boston’s legendary traffic.  The change, however, only paused the long slide in participation.  While the entries were of wonderful quality, they came from a shrinking pool of amateurs willing to make two treks into the city: one to drop off their plants and another to retrieve them.

... and amateur photography was
dazzling with entries from everywhere

Getting floral designers and judges to come into Boston was becoming difficult by 2012, my last year of running Mass Hort’s activities at the show.  Why?  Because so many designers now winter in warmer climates.  This year, the Garden Club Federation of Massachusetts formally dropped out of the show, dramatically reducing the number of floral design exhibits on view. Only Ikebana (which expanded to fill the space formerly allotted to the two floral design divisions) and Amateur Photography delivered the ‘wow’ impact I believe show attendees deserve (and those activities were relegated to the nearly invisible conference center beyond the exhibit hall).

Is it a bygone era?

This is a difficult essay to write because – as I stated at the outset – I have an emotional investment in the success of the flower show.  With the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, the ten years at Seaport sapped the show of its energy by its smaller footprint and relative inaccessibility to the show’s target audience.  Paragon does not publish attendance figures, but my observation is that the show draws fewer people each year.  Friends tell me Paragon has told them there will definitely be a flower show at Seaport in 2020, and that a search is on for a suitable venue for 2021 and beyond.  I wish them success, but I fear the winds of change have sealed the show’s fate.

S'no Fun at the Old Homestead

In this unusual winter of 2018-2019, it took until Winter Storm Quiana to finally bring the Boston area enough snow to make it necessary to fire up our snowblower.  That event also began the annual nature-versus-nurture ritual in our family of arguing that Neal Cannot Possibly Know Anything About Snow Removal Because He Was Born in Florida.

I grew up in a snow-free environment

Yes, it is true.  I am a native of Miami.  I did not experience snow until I was 20 years old, and then only because I drove two hundred miles for the specific purpose of personally witnessing actual flakes of snow falling out of the sky (it seemed like a good idea at the time).

But that was in 1969.  Since 1971 I have lived exclusively in snowy locales.  I once lived in Schenectady, NY, where it is rumored the snow never melts.  I dwelled in Chicago where it begins snowing on Halloween and does not stop until late April, if then.  And I have spent 30 of the past 38 years in New England; sixteen of them with a 220-foot-long driveway that most decidedly would not clear itself without my intervention (Betty's rebuttal is that for seven of those years, I managed to be away on business every time it snowed).

For 16 years, we lived in a home
with a 220-foot-long driveway

Surely my adult tenure as a ‘northerner’ counts for something.  But not according to my wife, who was raised in the Finger Lakes region of New York; the anointed Snow Capital of America.  While I was busy tending the family mango and avocado plantation in January, February and March, Betty was working shoulder-to-shoulder with her father to clear six-foot-high drifts of the white stuff.  I freely admit she had a head start on me; but I’ve had nearly five decades to catch up.

I am not allowed to use the snowblower because I ‘don’t do it right’.  What, exactly, is the ‘right’ way?  You point the snowblower down the driveway and put it in gear.  You turn the crank on the gizmo that throws it left or right.  What could be easier? 

I invented a snowblower on
skis for our gravel driveway,
but I still 'do it wrong'

Well, our driveway is not macadam.  It is loose stone (to allow precipitation to percolate down into the water table rather than into storm drains).  Three years ago, I invented – and may yet decide to patent – a means of mounting the ‘maw’ of our snowblower onto a pair of skis so the business end of the machine rides an inch above the stone.  It is a sight to behold and it works wonderfully well.  But I am not allowed to be its wrangler because (it is alleged) I picked up too many stones on the lone pass of the driveway I was allowed to make.

Because of all the plants along it,
even shoveling the sidewalk requires
spousal supervision

I am instead consigned to the hand-shoveling of the sidewalk.  But even that requires close spousal supervision.  You see, we have no grass.  If we did, we could pile snow on it from now until Memorial Day.  Instead, we have trees, shrubs of many sizes, and perennials.  It’s never OK to put snow on a shrub (duh), but snow must also be spread out within perennial beds, never allowing snow to become too deep.  Also, to prevent accidentally covering small shrubs, snow should preferably be transported to the moss pathways that divide our garden into planting beds.

If I sound like I’m griping, it’s only because I think I’ve earned another shot at the back end of our Ariens Deluxe 22” machine when Winter Storm Ryan comes around.  I’ll even keep shoveling the sidewalk.  And besides, the family mango plantation has long since been bulldozed to make way for a shopping center.

You Can Take the Gardener Out of the Garden, But...

My wife, Betty, and I took a much-needed and long-delayed vacation last month.  Our original plan had been a month in New Zealand (where it’s midsummer) but, coming just four months after a total knee replacement, Betty’s surgeon advised against 20 hours on a plane and strenuous hiking. 

As it turned out, she made a remarkably swift and full recovery, but we made our January reservations in November.  And so instead, we chose a week in London and a week in Paris.  The forecast for London was chilly and damp.  For Paris, it was chillier and with a chance of Yellow Vests.

Expecting to be primarily indoors, we built our itinerary around a series of special art and culture exhibitions in those two cities.  In all, we visited fifteen museums and galleries, several with those ‘once in a generation’ kind of blockbuster events.

Why, then, did we keep ending up in gardens?

Snowdrops in bloom in January in St. James Park, London

It started in London.  We walked everywhere and, England being England, we kept running into things in bloom.  There were unexpected blooming irises in St. James Park.  Millbank Garden, a long, narrow park opposite the Tate Britain beckoned with a pocket garden where daphne and camellias were in flower despite the short days and chilly nights. 

It became a part of our day: finding small, protected parks where tough, seasoned plants were showing their stuff.  Park Crescent, at the southern tip of Regent’s Park, yielded a hedge with a white bottlebrush-type flower we could not identify.  A winter vegetable garden valiantly hung on at the Duck Island Cottage opposite the Horse Guards Parade, and a scattering of Galanthus (snowdrops) bloomed nearby.

A flower market in the Marais District

Paris provided more unexpected gardens, albeit of a different kind.  It was colder in Paris – not Boston-cold, but with daytime highs in the low 40s – and we were even greeted with a burst of sleet our first day.  We spotted our first garden on the south side of the Notre Dame Cathedral, where a pair of large raised beds provided homes for cold-weather bedding plants like Stachys byzanta (lambs ear) and hellebores.

Walking along the Seine on our way to the Musee d’Orsay, it seemed every houseboat on the river sported large boxes of brightly-colored flowers.  The Marais district sported dozens of window boxes and a large weekend flower market.

Can you really get a gardener out of the garden?  I don’t think so.  You can go to see art but, in the end, you can’t stop also seeing all the color that nature unexpectedly surprises us with, even in the depths of winter.

Celie Sturtevant

My path to becoming a writer was not a conventional one.  I lacked an MFA from any college, I attended no university-affiliated writers’ workshop, and I had no circle of established writer friends from which to draw wisdom.  What I had was a head full of ideas and an urge to get them down on paper.  Because I was learning as I wrote, some of my writing ‘lessons’ were painful to absorb.

Celie Sturtevant

One of those lessons came at the hands of Lucille ‘Celie’ Sturtevant, who passed away last week at the age of 91.

By way of background, Betty and I led a nomadic existence for several decades.  I made the most of career opportunities with the result we were sometimes in a given city for just a few years.  We came, we set up housekeeping, and we left without leaving footprints in the community we nominally called home.  That changed in 1999 when we returned to the Boston area, and to the same town we had called home through the 1980s.

This time, we began to sink down roots.  We joined a community garden, Betty joined the local women’s club and garden club.  And she began telling me stories of the people she met in those clubs.  I came to know those people personally when I volunteered to be the ‘strong back’ at club events. 

Celie was one of the people who made a deep and indelible impression.  She was a tiny woman, but full of laughter, smart insights about people and events, Yankee ingenuity, and affection for those around her.  Though in her 70s when I met her, she was a golfer and a skier.

When I retired in 2005, I had the outline of plots for several books, one of which became my second published work, The Garden Club Gang.  My plot was simple: four ‘women of a certain age’, acting out of friendship for one another, come together to do something very much outside their comfort zone.  Complications ensue. 

One of those four characters was modeled on Celie.  I knew enough about writing to understand you don’t lift someone from life and put them down on the page intact.  You change things around.  You create a mosaic and turn that montage into a mold that becomes your character.  Still, a writer has the leeway to insert a few ‘tells’ that give a wink to the character’s true identity.

When the first draft was done, Betty read it and suggested I might want to show it to Celie.  I called her and asked if she’d like to be a ‘first reader’ for one of my manuscripts.  She said she would be delighted.  When I dropped off a printout of the text, I made no mention I might have modeled a character on her.

I should mention the ‘something’ these four ‘women of a certain age’ do is plan and execute the robbery of a large New England fair.

Four years later, Celie
made a second
appearance

A week later, Celie called and said I could pick up the document.  When I arrived at her home, she was seated at her kitchen table, the manuscript in front of her.  She motioned me to the chair opposite her.  She was drumming her fingers on the draft of my book, and she was biting her lower lip.

I sat down.  She drummed her fingers a moment longer and then forcefully shoved the manuscript across the table toward me.  In her sternest voice she said, “I would never do anything like this.”  Defiant, she then folded her arms.

I went back to the drawing board.  I recast the character, excising anything that might conceivably lead a reader to conjure up an image of Celie Sturtevant.  In the process, I created a better, more nuanced and sympathetic character than the one I had written just a few months earlier.   Celie received one of the first copies of The Garden Club Gang.  I urged her to read it and she did.  Her review was highly positive; she said, apart from the character’s diminutive stature, she recognized nothing about herself.

Celie's third time; this
spring will be her fourth

Celie’s reaction that day in her home was a lesson I never forgot.  Ever since, I’ve made certain my characters, while inspired by people I know and admire (or, in some cases, know and dislike intensely) have physical characteristics and personality traits either imagined or borrowed from multiple sources.

This spring, the character inspired by Celie will appear in the fourth installment of what has become The Garden Club Gang series.  In fact, her much-transformed alter ego comes center stage in this outing.

In attending her memorial service this past weekend, I saw how deeply she touched the lives of those around her and her community.  I can state from personal experience she certainly touched mine.