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Gardening: The world needs more hero gardeners

 
White and green caladiums and white impatiens at the Discovery Garden in Seffner.
White and green caladiums and white impatiens at the Discovery Garden in Seffner.
Published June 24, 2016

Even if you don't have a yard, you can still have a garden.

Public gardens are always glad for volunteers, and you can learn much by working there.

Some people make a garden wherever they find a patch of ground. Pat Rose, whose garden was recently featured in this column, brought me an article from the Daily Gazette of Schenectady, N.Y., that tells about Donald Wolfe, 69.

Wolfe, who has emphysema and uses a wheelchair, lives in an apartment in New York City. He planted, nurtures and waters a garden he created on a piece of land in the median of nearby traffic.

To get there, he puts a jug of water in his wheelchair with his oxygen tank on the back. Then he pushes it 38 steps to the elevator, 54 steps though the lobby, 75 steps down the block to the corner and 37 steps across Eighth Avenue. He has to stop a few times on the way since he has only 18 percent of his lung capacity.

"Whenever I see an empty spot of dirt, I think, what could you grow in it?" he says.

The first year everything he planted was trampled. He has since surrounded his patch with a nylon-rope fence. His second year he planted geraniums, but they did not do well because they didn't get enough sun. He planted daffodils last fall because the New Yorkers for Parks gave him the bulbs. The photo with the article showed them blooming nicely and a handsome Donald Wolfe watering them from a five gallon jug. He plans to add tulips next year and probably annuals for the summer and fall.

That story has been making the rounds of Pat Rose's family and friends. Her sister Adrianne Karis, who is 92 and still gardens and rides a bike, said it reminded her of when she "took over a little triangle of dirt at our nearby corner at the traffic light, arranging for the town to make a triangle out of old telephone poles and putting dirt in it so I could plant flowers and beautify that ugly corner."

She also used to bring gallon containers full of water and would walk her lawn mower over and mow the little bit of grass and pick up the beer cans and other trash that people would throw out while they stopped for the light. Eventually the shopping center took it over.

Donald Wolfe also has to pick up the trash. Why do people think that gardens are waiting for trash? Banana peels would help, but not cigarette and cigar butts. I once was at a garden festival where some of the people wore shirts that said "Don't leave your butts behind you."

When I was in college we went with our teacher, Louise Bush-Brown, to plant window boxes in the poorest parts of Philadelphia. She had started the wonderful work several years before. She was told it would never work, that the people would not cooperate, that the boxes would be vandalized.

It did work. Each block had a leader and the flowers caused neighbors to begin to know one another. The men built the boxes and put them under the windows and along the scruffy streets.

Bush-Brown had every garden group in the area, including us students, growing plants to fill those boxes. When the planting day came, we loaded up the plants and took them to our block, where the people were happily waiting to help us plant. By the time we finished, the block was no long dreary but beautiful.

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I was fortunate to be taken to the celebration dinner the next fall with both Louise and James Bush-Brown, who were famous for their America's Garden Book.

All the block leaders were there. One man stood up and said, "We used to have troubles, even murders on our block, but since we've had the flowers, we don't have that any more."

There is a lot of heroic gardening going on here in Florida. All the Master Gardeners volunteer many hours every year.

God bless them all.

Monica Brandies is an experienced gardener and author of 12 gardening books. She can be reached at monicabrandies@yahoo.com. Her website is gardensflorida.com.