ShareThisLike most gardeners, Frances Hill-Bolton, a supervisor of adults who have challenging behaviors at the Lucas County (Ohio) Board of Developmental Disabilities, squeezes quality time with her garden in around a busy working schedule. She lives in Toledo.
Here's how she describes her garden life and time:
-- Garden specs: I have four different flower beds, including 24-by-24-feet; 96-by-14-feet, and 10 large pots. Along the side of my house is a memory garden for my dear friend who died of breast cancer. She always would come over and steal a flower or a gadget that I had in the garden. There's an angel lying on a concrete bench that I had given her, and when she passed, I asked her son if I could have them. So he gave them to me and I spray-painted them to represent breast cancer. Almost every day I will go over to have a little talk with her.
-- When did you start gardening? With no interest in planting flowers 20 years ago, I brought two big concrete pots to put flowers in annually. My former neighbor (Christina Gipson, I call her Mama Kris) had a gorgeous garden. She is responsible for me becoming a gardenaholic. She always talked about different plants and how she'd move a plant because it needed more sun or more shade. She showed me garden books. I often asked her, "How do you work in your yard from sunrise to sunset?" She replied, "It relaxes you, takes your mind off of everything." Kris gave me my first perennial -- a green and gold August Moon hosta that she'd dug up from her garden, and I watched it grow.
-- What do you grow? Hostas, Asiatic lilies, ferns. In large pots, I've had good luck with peppers (banana, green, and red), lettuce, cucumbers, and grape tomatoes.
-- Favorite plant: Oriental grass. It's about 6 feet tall and green; in winter it gets a feathery plume and turns cream and burgundy. I love to sit out on my patio on a cool breezy day and listen to the sound of the rustling grasses. It just relaxes you.
-- Give us a gardening tip: First of all, you have to like to garden. Then, you need knowledge. And buying quality products such as good fertilizer will give you good results.
-- Hours spent gardening: Gardenaholics don't have a set time, but when you're employed, you have to work it into your schedule. Saturday works for me, from about 6 a.m. to 2 or 3 p.m. You lose track of time.
Annual expense: $500. I might need a truckload of river rocks, pots, fertilizer (Miracle-Gro). I'm always breaking shovels and replacing gloves. I love gazing balls (I have five). And annuals. I like garden colors that correspond with the house (a rose-pink with burgundy). And this year, I built a 4-foot-long planter out of patio bricks.
-- Challenges: Dealing with chronic pain from my degenerative disc problem. Gardening helps prevent me from stiffening up because movement releases some pressure off the disc. But I have to be very careful and know when to sit down (I take a lot of breaks), how to lift carefully. I sometimes sit on the ground to pull weeds. Also, I challenge myself to be creative.
-- I'm proud of: Being able to create my own look. When it's all done, I can observe people passing by and looking at my yard, even trying to copy my ideas. That's the payoff.
-- What I've gotten out of gardening: Sweaty and musty, a good workout. And hearing my husband complain about me digging plants up and moving them around every year. He just doesn't understand.
(Contact Tahree Lane at tlane(at)theblade.com.)
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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