A Walk in the Garden with Bob Hill Growing in Love The couple that plants together stays together <strong>Mar</strong>/<strong>Apr</strong> <strong>2019</strong> • 10
Janet Hill lived on several rented Northern Illinois farms as a child; her father an itinerant, interesting, hardworking, tavern-owning, booze-imbibing, native-born Hoosier who, in his early youth, had followed the wheat combines across mid-America. He always had gardens on those rented farms; no weeds allowed. Janet helped some with that, picking tomatoes and beans, gathering eggs, adding life experience, her indefatigable work ethic and her mother’s love of flowers along the way. Bob Hill might have planted a flower or two somewhere in his youth and teenage years, but memory might give way to myth somewhere in all that. Let’s just say that the reasons for Bob and Janet’s 56-year marriage continuing so happily at what’s now our Hidden Hill Sculpture Garden lean heavily in her favor. You can grow a marriage and a garden at the same time. That combination mostly began about 44 years ago, when we purchased our now 155-year-old Utica farmhouse with its leaky tin roof, faded rooms, dogscratched doors, six acres of weeds and a mortgage we could handle. Our first flowers came from Janet’s Aunt Helen, a woman whose work ethic and sense of home, garden and place is best described in the incident during which she was feeling heart palpitations, an ambulance was called but she wouldn’t leave until she finished washing the dishes. Uncle Elmer, her husband and a distillery warehouse employee, worked steadily in the monster vegetable garden on the hill behind their house and shared a tiny crabapple seedling that now that looms about 30 feet above our driveway. Janet Hill. Aunt Helen. Uncle Elmer. Three of a kind. So fast-forward into our endless cleanups, building a barn, building stone walls, cutting down trees, planting more trees, removing water lines, adding water lines, raising beef, not raising beef, tearing down old fences, building new fences, building new sidewalks, tearing down an arbor, building a new arbor, putting a new roof on the house, adding rooms to the house, adding actual working plumbing to the house, putting a new heating system in the house, putting a new heating system into our summer kitchen, adding a back porch with screens, repairing the front porch, tuck-pointing the chimneys, tuck-pointing the chimneys again and, oh yeah, raising two wonderful kids and having mixed luck with a lovably psycho Irish Setter and several aloof-to-needy cats. Maybe about five years into all that, Janet Hill decided we needed a monster vegetable garden in our side yard, giving her personal satisfaction along with the opportunity to can and freeze those homegrown crops. The creation of this quarter-acre vegetable garden required cutting down a few maverick trees, a monster cleanup of existing grass and weeds and the discovery we were planting said vegetable garden over the top of our very ancient, hand-poured cement-and-tile septic system. We didn’t have the time or money to deal with all that so we just figured tomato-plant-roots wouldn’t go that deep; let’s just move on here. Plant we did — under Janet’s specific directions. Old school stuff. Lettuce. Cabbage. Tomatoes. Potatoes. Beans. Peas. Sweet corn. Sinking ever deeper into Janet’s family gene pool, we planted enough vegetables to feed the city of Cincinnati, were it just a little closer. We tilled, weeded, mulched and wore out several hoes. We soon had our huge vegetable garden. Stuff we could eat. Stuff we could give away. Stuff we couldn’t give away. Stuff that required Janet’s canning and freezing. Stuff we did enjoy all winter –– and maybe the following winter. Some canned food that lingered in the basement longer than the Ronald Reagan administration. Have I neglected to mention the strawberry beds at the edges of this garden? They did provide our great summerfresh fruits until we discovered a Huber’s just up the road that would do all that planting for us. This awakening followed the acid-loving blueberry patch that never got the blue-fruit memo. Our failed apple orchard. The pathetic peaches. I was good at coming up with broad ideas. Janet was good at the necessary details. The organization. Actual plans. The financing. The cleanup required at the end of all my strokes of genius. She is, I had become very fond of saying, “The rest of me — the best of me.” I meant it. But it did take awhile to bury my 1950s masculine instincts, and not always successfully. As we grew this garden we evolved a plan, joking, sort of, that as long as we stayed at opposite ends of our acreage during certain key moments in its development, most of this would work. It did. I went large. She was most happy with the smaller, tighter areas; her daylily bed and greatly reduced vegetable garden. This evolved into a formally designated “Janet’s Garden” — a tight boxwood and area with antique planters and a fountain in the middle encircled by shrubs, metal fence and dogwood and That combination mostly began about 44 years ago, when we purchased our now 155-year-old Utica farmhouse with its leaky tin roof, faded rooms, dog-scratched doors, six acres of weeds and a mortgage we could handle. blackgum trees. She could weed one section of it for hours. I got tired of weeding about 1997. The work is never done, even as we have greatly reduced Hidden Hill’s retail operation to focus more on art and entertainment. Our best times are when just the two of us are here on a quiet evening — Janet cleaning up some needy bed; me messing with trees and shrubs. Some nights, we will ride around in a golf cart. Just the two of us — me taking in the wonder of what we have created; Janet fussing about the weeds. So it goes for now — even while knowing it can’t last forever. • About the Author Bob Hill owns Hidden Hill Nursery and can be reached at farmerbob@ hiddenhillnursery.com. For more information, including nursery hours and event information, go to www.hiddenhillnursery. com <strong>Mar</strong>/<strong>Apr</strong> <strong>2019</strong> • 11
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