0704 Growing the perfect garden, one brick at a time
By Robin Hauenstein
June 29, 2011
402
Summary: The recent benefit garden tour sponsored by the Orrville Dalton YMCA highlighted five Orrville-area homes. One in particular tied history to the gardens.
Saturday, June 25, the public got a good look at five area gardens on a tour to benefit the Orrville Dalton YMCA. While each garden was unique and well-sculpted, one gardener displayed her unique horticultural talents with bricks.
Linda McHenry retired this year after 38 years as an elementary school teacher. An Orrville native, she and her children attended the local schools. Combining her love of education with gardening, McHenry bricked in some of the past with the growing present.
"Im an Orrville person," McHenry said, as she described the use of bricks from the old Orrville Junior High School, and the Oak Street and Maple Street elementaries. McHenry started with five bricks from the former Oak Street Elementary, where she taught for several years, taking them from the demolition rubble. She spent a considerable amount of time chiseling off the mortar and cement, to get to the bare brick.
She and her children attended Maple Street Elementary, and that too, had a lot of nostalgic appeal for her as well. After she picked up bricks from the now-demolished Maple Street Elementary and the junior high school, she took a brick from each school to a monument engraver in Wooster. Each brick was engraved with the school name and its years of operation. McHenry then created a small walkway around part of her flowerbeds with the bricks, and added more bricks and gravel to fill out the area.
Around the walkway McHenry planted a small herb garden and added perennials. A small sign in the neat and growing herb garden read Please Touch the Herbs.
A look around the property and the elaborate gardens can give a quick idea of the hours it would take to maintain the flowerbeds. The work is done by McHenry.
"I just do this all by myself. I like to fiddle in the gardens," she added, with a smile. McHenry has lived at the house for 12 years and said the previous owners just had white daisies around the house when she bought it. Most of her green thumb work started when her three children were in college, and she had more free time to work with the flowers.
"I laid a garden hose down, to look at the curves of the gardens, and went from there," she said.
McHenry was more than happy to talk about the bricks and the flowerbeds. Along the side of the house was another unique feature: a childrens playhouse. While that may not seem out of the ordinary, the house was built in 1984 by her grandfather. McHenrys three children all played in the house, and when she moved, she had Berts Marathon load the playhouse on a truck and deliver it to her new home. A sign on the tiny front porch of the playhouse reads Built by Popo.
McHenry drew out the design for the playhouse. "Grandpa was wonderful," she said. Some work has been done to replace aging parts of the playhouse. For now, it is a garden shed, but soon, McHenry said, shell be cleaning it out for another generationher grandchildrento use.
The garden tour was a fundraiser for the Orrville Dalton YMCA building fund. Other gardens featured on the tour included Ann and David McPeek, Jeannie and Gary Gonter, Suzy and Al Auble, and Rick and Kathy Geething.
