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Ever since Eve thought the apples were nice, but that the back corner of Eden would be a great spot for a few salad greens, women have been gardening. It’s been a part of our lives since the beginning, so remarkably we don’t often think about an act that feeds us, clothes us, shades us, warms us, and spruces up our world.  We don’t necessarily take the time to discover the “why” beneath the “need”.

It has always been a part of Cindi Sullivan’s life. The Gardening Expert who stepped into Fred Wiche’s shoes at WHAS Radio and TV recalls her family’s involvement with the land, “…my dad for as long as I can remember had a big vegetable garden; he also grew lots of different flowers. It was a family activity; we did yard work, and I just always enjoyed it”.

Sullivan’s mother worked in the office at the University of Kentucky College of Agriculture for 48 years, and for about four years or so, Sullivan’s father took a break from his job as an accountant to work as the Horticultural Farm Manager at U of K, and so Sullivan and her family lived on the horticultural research farm during that time.

 “I say very often that I am really one of the luckiest women in the world because I’ve got a job that most people consider a hobby,” says Sullivan with a kind of quiet awe. Her path began when Sullivan, pregnant with her second child, Bradley, now 11, and her husband Steve (An executive vice president with the Corradino Group, he was then a geology major at U of K where he met Cindi who was completing her horticultural degree.) along with their daughter, Stephanie “Stevie”, 15 years old on the 15^th of this month, moved to Louisville.

Sullivan took a part-time job with Operation Brightside, and eventually began working with Wiche. When she’s not helping us choose the right plants, maintain our roses, transplant our hydrangeas, or care for our gardening tools, Sullivan is working on her own garden.

Last year Sullivan and her family traded their home on an acre near Prospect for a stately Italian Renaissance home located near Cherokee Park in order to minimize their daily commute to jobs and school, and now Sullivan is passionately detailing plans for her “new” garden.

“There’s a big, beautiful magnolia in our front yard that is absolutely gorgeous…I’m going to add some more perennial plantings to increase the color a bit; there’s a lot of green in its formality so I’m going to put in splashes of color…I’m espaliering some fruit trees (apple and pear); that’s a pruning method where you train trees to a strict shape, and I’m doing these interesting shapes on the side of the house.  This house cries out for espaliers,” Sullivan airily remarks.

In the Sullivan’s new garden will be a, “…fountain that’s probably going to go up early this summer, and there’s a shade garden area that I’m working on, and I’m going to put some roses in so there’s lots of stuff to do,” muses Sullivan. Last year, their first summer in the Cherokee Parkway house, one priority for Sullivan was to plant asparagus which had also been the first thing she did at their Prospect home; they had a crop of tomatoes, eggplants, and peppers last year as well.

Sullivan confides with candor, “Gardening is not only a means to an end; gardening helps you to feel productive; it helps you to feel like you’ve accomplished something. When you plant a seed, and you watch it grow, and you see either the fruit or the flower of your labor there’s such a sense of gratification in it, and gardening, I think is such a stress reliever; it is a way to connect to nature…I don’t know what I’d do without it…and it’s not even, for me anyway, as much the plants as the soil; you know there’s just something so relaxing about digging and planting”.

Leslie Isaacs has been the Horticultural Manager at Churchill Downs for about two years; before that she had been a horticulturist at the Louisville Zoo. From the time she was 15, Isaacs had worked at a variety of jobs, but finally at 25 she realized she wanted to go back to college, choosing first Berea and then transferring to Eastern to pursue a horticulture degree.

“I had been working for a number of years at office-type jobs,” relates Isaacs as she leans back in the desk chair of her office that looks out on the brilliant afternoon wash of sunshine in the greenhouse.  “I had been in retail for a while…and I had managed a couple of garden centers…I wanted to get out of the buildings; I wanted something that was going to take me outside and diversify my day…I love plants and flowers so it was a natural progression”.

The Churchill Downs greenhouse is 12,000 square feet of 50,000 plants blanketed by an automated heating and cooling system.  Isaacs and her crew of 11 full time assistants grow enough plants to not only fill the gardens once, but to have enough in case a frost or freeze destroys some, or all, of the flowers. 

A lot of people think Churchill Downs’ famous tulips are grown in the greenhouse, but that’s not the case, “…we plant those right after the Fall meet, the first week of December…and then it’s just like at your own home, it’s up to mother nature and her good graces whether the tulips will survive or not.  The problem is,” explains Isaacs, “the first Saturday in May, if it’s around the 6^th or something like that, that’s very late for a tulip bloom and so I have to make that call during the opening week whether or not the tulips are going to be left for Derby, or if we’re going to have to replace them before Derby Day with some of the bedding plants.”

Isaacs and her crew this year had pansies, geraniums, petunias, and dusty miller ready for the flowerbeds throughout Churchill Downs; they have also been planning landscaping for the new Central Avenue Gardens that are to be a part of the new Central Avenue Expansion Project to include all of Central Avenue between Taylor Boulevard up to Fourth Street. 

Isaacs is single and lives about a mile from her sister in Hikes Point; she is “…very involved in taking care of my niece and nephew”, their pictures sit on her desk; and she’s just purchased a new home with a large, wooded backyard that has a creek running through it. With an air of relished expectancy, Isaacs explains that she’s waiting to see what comes up in her backyard this year so she can “inventory” her corner of the world and plan it’s future.

“The owner before me had a lot of perennials and different things planted here and there…I did have a vegetable garden last year, and I’ll probably have both (flowers and vegetables) this year, but there’s a lot of wildlife, so I don’t get to harvest much; I think they (the animals) eat pretty well though,” says Isaacs with a wry, good natured smile.  

If Isaacs could dream up her ideal garden it would have a more botanical garden arrangement like what she worked with during an internship at Oulu Botanical Gardens in Oulu, Finland during her college days; and after college in South America where she did some floristic studies in South America. “I would probably try playing around with the odd things, the lesser known plants and figuring out what could do well here and how to make it better…I would definitely go more native; I like the native plant materials and using the naturally occurring plants for this area,” she explains.

Isaacs stops dreaming for now and comes back to earth continuing with current plans for her new backyard, “I have a hammock that I’m going to put up this year…and there’s a very large sugar maple that shades the backyard where I’m going to put a lot of different ferns…ferns are probably one of my all-time favorites…all the different ones…I’m even considering putting up a little greenhouse because I like the tropical plants, too…and fixing it up to where it’s kind of a reading room.”

Sisters working together to help us build a water garden, Jenny Wuest, single with a nine-year-old daughter, and Greta Sparks, married with two young boys, have worked together in their family’s store, The Aquarius Water Gardens for more than 10 years. Their involvement with the store started with sweeping the floor or working the cash register and grew like a lotus plant in summer; now Wuest manages the greenhouse and plans the landscaping around the store and Sparks handles the wholesale end, generally managing the store and getting orders together, both work with customers.

According to Wuest and Sparks, a water garden can be as simple as a small, premolded plastic form in perhaps a round or square shape with a few water plants in it such as a lotus or water lilly, and it can develop into a water garden that involves digging a hole in the ground with the more natural shape of a pond and lining it with plastic.

A water garden can include along with water plants, maybe grasses or small trees such as a Japanese Maple to which you can add perhaps a wooden bridge, stone rocks along a path through the water, gold fish or coy; islands of land in the middle of the pond might be adorned with a gazing ball, birdbath, fountain, frogs or turtles made from either concrete, or a newer casting resin that is lighter and can stay outside all winter and not crack.

Instead of a bouncing stream a Japanese Water Garden has a smooth flow, and says Sparks, “you get into a Zen (type-of) gardening…you put really fine gravel or sand down…and if you have a rock in the middle of it you make the strokes in the sand with a rake to make it look like water’s going around the rock…it’s a peaceful, mediation area”.

A bog garden is a shallow area of water or a low-lying area of the yard where the dirt is loosely thatched up and planted with moisture loving plants.  In Wuest’s garden at home she has had vegetables, but now mostly flowers, perennials, and some unusual plants such as grasses and bulbs. “I have a bog garden that’s about 6 by 17 feet…and I grow water iris and other bog plants like pickerel rush which has a pretty, dark green, broad leaf and a purple flower on it,” explains Wuest.

Visit a place of wisteria and gurgling water smack dab in the middle of downtown Louisville, a garden with magic derived by virtue of its Cheshire-grin appearance where you don’t expect it—behind The Garden Wall at 636 East Market Street. Through the shop and out the back door, you step into a peaceful microcosm amidst a distant whoosh of traffic; a place where the North wind’s face hangs on a brick wall, a bridge crosses a pond of gold and orange fish swimming under splashes from metal pussy willow ornamentation.

This is the harvest of owner, Frances Hammers’ lifelong dream of having her own shop even though she enjoyed her previous 11 ½ years of working with former Mayor Jerry Abramson on such projects as Operation Brightside.

“My family grew up in the country on a farm, and I’ve always loved being able to touch the earth.” Hammers, who is divorced with four grown children, three grandchildren, two step grandchildren, and a “granddog”, black, standard poodle named, Joque, an occasional, companionable presence in the shop, is assisted by her daughter, Jackquie Hammers, ace-bookkeeper, web designer, and display assistant while she attends school to study interior design.

Many of Hammers’ friends live in either apartments or small homes, as she does, and so they do their gardening where they can in small areas, in pots and containers, hanging from baskets, or climbing fences and walls. “We all like to touch the earth, and there’s just something so soothing and wonderful and spiritual about it,” exclaims Hammers. “I always say it satisfies the soul. I have some customers who won’t wear gloves; they want to touch the earth, and some of them even say they won’t wear shoes; they garden barefoot.”

In a quiet tone Hammers adds, “Well, according to the Bible we came from dirt, and we go back to dirt so why wouldn’t we feel good when we touch the earth…” and then she smiles past the moment with a, “That’s your philosophy for the day”, and quickly assists a customer grappling with an ethereal garden fairy.

Vivien Reinhardt was mayor of Pee Wee Valley for 13 years and until recently was a Planning and Zoning Commissioner for 22 years; this she managed to squeeze into her life of raising seven children. “I’ve gardened, I suppose, for about 25 years now; I had an interest as long as I can remember, but with the family I was unable to spend the time gardening that I would have liked to have spent; then when they all grew up and began moving away…I spent more time, and I just really got into it intensely,” chuckles Reinhardt.

For the past 22 years Reinhardt has been a member of the Louisville Cardinal Garden Club; they meet one Wednesday of each month. “Oh, that’s the most fun thing I do,” states Reinhardt enthusiastically. “We meet and have, well, we eat, don’t you eat everywhere you go…and we have a business meeting, and then we have a program, sometimes given by the members and sometimes we have others such as Diane Heilenman (the gardening columnist for the Courier-Journal) who was here last week…We visit garden places…we’ve been to Bernheim”.

Reinhardt used to have a large vegetable garden when her children were young, but since she doesn’t need many vegetables now she mostly has flowers in her garden. “I have a New England Saltbox style house, and I try to do more gardening with the old fashioned flowers, or the flowers that are suitable to this kind of home…I have some bird feeders, and a bird bath,” explains Reinhardt. “No, not so much whimsy in my garden as modern gardens have because you have to be plain, everything has to be rather plain in this type of cottage garden.”

Reinhardt’s garden is exactly the garden she wants although she admits to continual change, “…because gardeners like to make changes, they’re always making changes,” she smiles. “…the mountain laurel, that is my favorite shrub; it’s in the rhododendron family; my favorite perennial is the pink peony, but my most, my very most favorite flower of all is the little, wild, blue violet”.

Reinhardt reveals herself, as all gardeners do, in her exclamations over this bloom and that seed, this type of soil and that catalog, and in scrawled entries and photographs in her gardening journal she records the daily, windswept growth, progress, and requirements of her portion of land.

“I don’t know how I would say it, “ remarks Reinhardt about her love of gardening, “it is such a passion of mine that I just don’t know how I would tell somebody what it means to me…it’s a therapy when you’re troubled, and it’s rejuvenating, and it’s, oh, certainly good exercise out in the air, and umm, I don’t know…” she trails off, but appears thoughtfully sure and accepting of some blessing.

The sun knows “why”…the yellow canary sun shines on the city, it fills our bedroom in the morning, it enters a red rock canyon, it lingers on a window sill, but the sun feeds a garden—manna from the soil to our bodies and minds and a conduit to our soul. We women garden because it just feels right…

By Karen Gossett