The Garden Builder

As I’m focusing on weaving together the profile of today’s garden superman, a line from a song I sing at church popped in my head and seems appropriate: “We are many parts, we are all one body.” What and whom we’ve needed in the garden, God has assembled there.

Larry is one strong example – an answer to a prayer and a garden “body part” without which the garden would not be whole.

Another song that comes to mind when I think of Larry is the Indigo Girls tune Hammer and a Nail – “Gotta get out of bed and get a hammer and a nail, learn how to use my hands … now I know a refuge never grows from a chin in a hand and a thoughtful pose, got to tend the earth if you want a rose …”

Early start

Larry is a master gardener, and he’s been the primary “hammer-and-a-nail” guy who has sweated and toiled and built and worked and gotten things done in the garden this summer.

Larry says he’s always been interested in gardening – the first house he lived in after college, in the country in western Pennsylvania, had a big garden. Since then he’s lived in nine different houses and in every one has had a garden.

Larry grew up in western Pennsylvania, went to college there and lived there till his late 20s. He had a corporate career during which he and his family moved 13 times. They wound up in Kingsport in the late 80s/early 90s when Larry worked with Arcata Graphics. They moved away from the area but came back again in the early 2000s.

How Harvest of Hope?

Larry says he’s a member of the United Way of Greater Kingsport finance committee – one of the topics discussed by that group early in the year was funding available for the Harvest of Hope Garden and uncertainty of being able to execute the garden build – the United Way executive director asked Larry to get involved, and he answered the call.

“My approach is: do what has to be done,” Larry says.

Larry is a self-proclaimed builder and has plenty of practical, handy, hammer-and-nail skills, but he also has experience as a senior executive and a CPA, as a community supporter, a Christian, a master gardener and as an organizer and visionary.

As a broader coalition develops to foster more community gardening in Kingsport, Larry sees himself as a builder and a shaper – as one who will get new gardens going and fill gaps but not as the chief “tender” of the Harvest of Hope.

Gardeners needed

Paul, profiled earlier here, is one of the many who will be needed to maintain Harvest of Hope as other gardens grow from ideas to reality.

“We need to find a workgroup who wants to stay with and manage Harvest of Hope,” Larry says.

Of Paul, Larry says: “Paul’s a really neat guy. He’s got good common sense; innate intelligence. He just hasn’t has the same opportunities many others have had.”

Larry and Paul have spent a lot of time working together in the garden and have become friends. Larry sees the garden as a source of fulfillment for Paul, who is unemployed: “He’s able to provide value, maintain his self respect and associate with other people on a normal basis,” Larry says.

Fertile ground

The garden provides these same benefits to Larry, who is retired, and says he found himself initially “sitting in my basement” upon retiring from his job as a corporate executive.

This “challenge of retirement” is similar to but more of a problem for the unemployed like Paul, Larry says. The garden is an answer to that challenge – through the purpose and the connections it provides.

“Because of the diversity of the garden,” Larry says, “people from really wide backgrounds wind up interacting around a common interest. That is the core of friendship. Friendships don’t last and rarely develop without a common interest – that’s perhaps the key thing that will sustain the garden over time.

Soil sustenence

Not only is the garden a place for growing friendships, it’s a place where people can come together in the act of creation, says Larry, which he believes is key to the health of our society overall.

“There’s satisfaction in working with multiple senses to create something,” he says, “Be it a quilt, a woven cloth, a garden, a piece of furniture, literature, a poem …”

Working together in the garden, we create something of lasting value, Larry says.

Thanks to Larry for helping to create Harvest of Hope.