Saturday, February 20, 1999
Gardeners: You now have a network
These are the days that try gardeners' souls. And soils.
Fickle Cincinnati winters leave us guessing whether to put on snowsuits or sunscreen. They also wreak havoc on tender little plants in tender little gardens.
And on the people who raise them.
Peg St. Clair knows this. She knows that local gardeners are peering out windows this time of year, wondering if the roses made it through all the thawing and freezing. She knows they are thumbing desperately through plant catalogs, searching for plants that are neither true Northerner or true Southerner, since Cincinnati's Zone 5 growing climate is a little of both.
She knows gardeners here are biding their time, waiting for their own Opening Day.
Peg St. Clair is more than just a gardening expert and enthusiast. She is a gardening evangelist. Her utter zeal for the healing power of working in the dirt can raise a “Hallelujah!” out of even the most horticulturally challenged among us.
Next month, Ms. St. Clair, former education director at the Civic Garden Center, will roll out the first issue of Gardener's Network, a newsletter to inform, unite and excite the local gardening community.
We will learn of plants, classes, suppliers and career paths in horticulture. And if we read carefully, we will learn something of ourselves as well.
Who are Cincinnatians as gardeners?
A hardy lot, says Peg St. Clair.
The nearly 1 million of us who grow green things here contend with our own tempestuous little ecosystem, she says. This is a land of glacier-shaped hills and valleys, too far inland for the moderating effect of an ocean, too far south for consistently cold winters, too far north to be safe from blizzards and wind chills.
“From Columbus north, there's a lot of gardening activity,” she says. “In Southwestern Ohio, we're dealing with a lot more challenging conditions. There is tremendous fluctuation in temperature here, and no snow cover to protect plants when temperatures go up and down. The soil is more difficult, with lots of clay. In the summer we can have drought or we can have too much rain.”
Floods, plagues, pestilence. And yet we weed on.
One reason we persevere, Ms. St. Clair says, is because we find such good company in green pursuits.
Cincinnati gardeners are “down-to-earth, generous, kind, practical, gregarious, eager to learn and share what they know,” she says. They start prayer gardens at churches. They form young mothers' garden clubs, taking turns weeding each other's gardens and watching each other's kids. Some turn gardening into “an obsession — they want more and more. They know plants' Latin names and common names,” she says. “They read about their plants at night before they go to bed.”
She's right. We do.
And one of Peg St. Clair's gifts is that she gives us permission to dig, water, transplant and deadhead to our hearts' content. Because Peg St. Clair is convinced that gardening is not only good for us, it is essential.
“The pace of our lives is so busy that we have forgotten what it's like to connect to the sweetness of nature,” she says. “We act as if it's an extracurricular activity, that we'll do it if we have time.
“But that connection is essential to our souls, to our identity as human beings.”
Peg St. Clair has long been a welcome member of the Cincinnati gardening community. Now she emerges as a spokeswoman. When she sermonizes, we flower-, tree- and shrub-huggers shout “Amen.”
Recently an elderly gardener heard Peg's gardening pep talk. Later she stepped up to shake hands, and to utter words many local gardeners are thinking: “Go, girl, go!”
For information on the Gardener's Network, call 542-2466.
Krista Ramsey's column appears on Saturdays.
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