The other day I saw our first crocus peep out in our yard. The mere fact of this is due to our wonderful friend and gardener and much-beloved Chestertown resident Trams Hollingsworth (whose photos you see on our home page and here). I could never do justice to telling her story - her own words are the best for telling this tale.
I arrived on the Eastern Shore in 1969. A guidance counselor in my urban public school had suggested that my parents ind me a far-away boarding school. So as my friends were starting their tenth grade at Bethesda Chevy Chase HS my parents were driving me over the Bay bridge to the Gunston School. I remember seeing Centreville, Maryland for the first time, and sobbing “But I haven’t been THIS bad.”
In the forty years since, I’ve made my way 18 miles up route 213 to Chestertown. Washington College gave me a degree in English Literature. That qualified me to wait tables in most English-speaking countries. So I did. In 1981 I followed Paul McCartney to the small Caribbean island of Montserrat. I went to this small British colony with the intention of marrying Paul McCartney and never working again. But things didn’t work out exactly as I planned. I never met Paul. Instead I came home to Chestertown with a nine-year-old orphaned Montserratian street hustler whom I had adopted in Her Majesty’s High Colonial Court. That story was first published in the Washington Post Magazine and is reprinted in Here on the Chester, an anthology of Chestertown stories published by Washington College.
In summary, Chestertown is the village that carefully raised my wild child while my determined child dragged me along with him toward responsible adulthood.
Around the time my son Lenox began his career as a police officer, I quit my job as a college administrator to become a manual laborer. It was this sunny spring Saturday and I was closeted in my office between board meetings. I remember turning from my computer, looking out the window, and then calling a friend who is a professional gardener and asking her if she would give me a job. She said yes and I wrote my letter of resignation. Of the so many whimsical things I’ve done in my life, whimsical things like adopting a child, this phone call ranks high on my list of Fate’s blessings.
When Carol Mylander hired me I couldn’t tell a peony from a petunia, much less call them by their Latin names as she insisted. But, to the amazement of past employers, from Playboy Club to Washington College, she taught me how to take directions. Together we earned our Master Gardeners from the University of Maryland and, as our business grew, Carol made me a partner in Cultivation. We work, with our really great crew, in some of the most beautiful places on the Shore. Sometimes we are hired to maintain formal boxwood and rose gardens so that they’ll look as they have for the last hundred years. But sometimes we’ll be given a blank slate of small yard or wild riverfront. Then the challenge is designing and planting four seasons of native beauty to bring in all the migratory butterflies and birds and native wild animals that should, we think, share in every garden. And when we’re especially lucky, our clients concur that I should be looking for the appropriate marble faun, bird bath or quiet-time bench, at the estate auctions I haunt for my night-job as antique dealer.
(Pictured on the left, Katherine, Susan, Jessica, Carol and cabbage of CULTIVATION, as photographed by Trams.)
Around the time my son Lenox began his career as a police officer, I quit my job as a college administrator to become a manual laborer. It was this sunny spring Saturday and I was closeted in my office between board meetings. I remember turning from my computer, looking out the window, and then calling a friend who is a professional gardener and asking her if she would give me a job. She said yes and I wrote my letter of resignation. Of the so many whimsical things I’ve done in my life, whimsical things like adopting a child, this phone call ranks high on my list of Fate’s blessings.
When Carol Mylander hired me I couldn’t tell a peony from a petunia, much less call them by their Latin names as she insisted. But, to the amazement of past employers, from Playboy Club to Washington College, she taught me how to take directions. Together we earned our Master Gardeners from the University of Maryland and, as our business grew, Carol made me a partner in Cultivation. We work, with our really great crew, in some of the most beautiful places on the Shore. Sometimes we are hired to maintain formal boxwood and rose gardens so that they’ll look as they have for the last hundred years. But sometimes we’ll be given a blank slate of small yard or wild riverfront. Then the challenge is designing and planting four seasons of native beauty to bring in all the migratory butterflies and birds and native wild animals that should, we think, share in every garden. And when we’re especially lucky, our clients concur that I should be looking for the appropriate marble faun, bird bath or quiet-time bench, at the estate auctions I haunt for my night-job as antique dealer.
Since I started working in gardens I have also learned to keep a camera in my tool bucket along with tools and seeds. You never know when the cornflower seeds will blossom from inside the osprey nest. Just so happens, the blue flowers popped above the nest rim the same day as the chicks’ gold eyes. Click.
I took plenty of butterfly on zinnia before I got a little bored of that.
But I’ve yet to tire of the preying mantis biting the off the head of her mate and then chewing it slowly enough for me to get my close up lens focused. I sell some of my photos around town and, therefore some people think I’m a professional photographer and they ask to hire me for weddings and stuff.
I explain that I have no real talent for photography. I’m just lucky enough to have so much beauty in my life that even an unprofessional photographer can capture some of it. I work where the birds nests are and I work in such peace that a hatchling makes a relative racket. Time for me to wipe dirt and seeds from my close-up lens and wait for the rest of the clutch to emerge. Click, click. click. And the trick to getting rare close-ups of a baby bunny... Raise it in your sweatshirt pocket after the clients’ dog drops it at your feet in the vegetable garden.
Gardening is the only job, of so many I’ve had, when I’m eager for my vacation to end. Gardens, if planned right, are beautiful for twelve months a year. But there’s not too much to do in December or January but make wreaths of everything,
Gardening is the only job, of so many I’ve had, when I’m eager for my vacation to end. Gardens, if planned right, are beautiful for twelve months a year. But there’s not too much to do in December or January but make wreaths of everything,
watch birds devour berries, and take photographs of ice-glittered deadheads. Then in February, we begin again. This is the time to prune your butterfly bushes and crepe myrtles.
Stunt them now and they’ll explode in summer blooms. Now, on the season’s last snow, is the time to broadcast premergent where you don’t want cool season weeds to green up in spring. Just be sure not to “Preen” where you hope annual and wildflowers might reappear. And now is the time to clean last year’s nests out your birdhouses. The osprey have been coming earlier than their traditional St. Patrick’s Day eta. The blue birds and purple martins won’t be far behind. Then in March.... everything starts happening.
If you have garden questions, you’re welcome to call us. Carol can answer in Latin. Trams in English. We, with our really great crew, are Cultivation. 778-1560.
