Community garden illustrates cycle of life

Sure, there’s a rhythm to karaoke night. And hope in bingo.

But not nearly enough for the three women chatting in lawn chairs next to Decatur Christian Towers. Five years ago, in the shadow of the 14-story senior living facility, they put plow to earth, creating a daily drama of hope and disappointment, life and death, new memories and old.

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Photos by LOUIE FAVORITE / lfavorite@ajc.com

Ikey Howell plants tomato plants in her plot at the community garden at Decatur Christian Towers.

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William Canterbury checks his patients soaking up bright light from windows near the elevator. Canterbury rescues neighbors’ plants and nurses them back to health.

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A good gardener knows that mulching inhibits weeds and conserves water, and Carolyn Rhodes (standing) does the job while Howell takes a break. The two women are part of a trio of great-grandmothers who unofficially manage the plot.

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With the fruits of their labors in hand, Carolyn Rhodes (left) and Izora ‘Ikey’ Howell pause to appreciate their modest haul.

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The peppers are popping and, as always, so are the weeds. From left, Annie Nelson, Carolyn Rhodes and Ikey Howell tidy up their part of the nearly 21 rows that stretch across the back side of the twin buildings at Decatur Christian Towers.

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A closeup of the peppers growing in the community garden at Decatur Christian Towers.

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Aerial view of the community garden at Decatur Christian Towers. Residents of this assisted living facility tend faithfully to the garden, with amazing results.

See more photos of the community garden at Decatur Christian Towers

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They made a vegetable garden.

“That first year, it was all clay and rocks,” says Izora “Ikey” Howell, 84, wearing a light jacket to keep her warm on this April day. The ground kept coughing up long-ago bits of Church Street. Much hoeing and fertilizing led to a modest semicircle of tomatoes and beans.

Semicircle grew into square. Then, as more residents of Christian Towers joined in, square grew into rectangle. Now, at the outset of the 2008 growing season, the garden is a full-fledged amenity, with a sign-up sheet and its own sentence on the Christian Towers Web site. Some 21 rows stretch across the back side of the twin buildings. Pieces of cardboard staked into the ground read “Miele, Cantebury, Jernigan, Smith, Godwin” and so on.

No need, however, to mark the rows set aside for Howell, Carolyn Rhodes and Annie Nelson. Everyone knows their turf. Officially, the Christian Tower staff manages the garden. Unofficially, these three great-grandmothers do.

They believe in the adage to never tell a neighbor how to garden. But if a row grows weedy, these ladies notice. Last year, to screen the view of an unkempt patch, they planted a tall row of okra.

They’ve learned that inevitably, in parts of the garden, age trumps ambition. Some rows never get planted. Others do, only to flourish just as their caretakers fade.

Rhodes stares out from beneath a red visor and points to a row that sprouted with beets and flowers last year. “He didn’t harvest anything,” Rhodes says. “But he’s 80-something.” Then Rhodes, 85, catches herself, chuckling. “We’re all 80-something.”

Arthritis and fake hips won’t stop them from trying to match last year’s garden, Rhodes says. It filled their freezers with soup stock and pumped out tomatoes through October.

Howell nods. “Somebody made the comment that it was the first time they saw a garden that looked like a garden in a seed catalog.”

Rhodes pulls green gloves out of the gardening cart she wheels down from her room each morning. “Come on, Annie,” Rhodes says, “you want to go plant those peppers?”

Nelson, 75, leans forward in her chair and feels her aching back. She looks tired. “I guess so.”

Rhodes sprawls alongside one row and begins digging holes. She drags a cane with her. Howell follows, sprinkling fertilizer into each hole and wetting it with a couple glugs of jug water. Nelson finishes with a cayenne pepper seedling. All three smile — like children in a sandbox.

Winter is officially a memory. Hope fills the air. And sure as summer, the three friends begin this, their fifth season.

Spring: Earth and wind

Their eyes fix on the white kite. Howell and Rhodes watch it dance in a May wind that whips around the west side of the towers and across the grassy fetch beyond their garden. It’s homemade, with an old T-shirt for a body and a plastic newspaper sleeve for a tail.

“There he goes,” Howell says.

“Yep,” says Rhodes. “Old Ralph’s at it again.”

Ralph Miller, 76, is a fellow gardener. He does a few collards, turnip greens and beets in the last row. But make no mistake, when a stiff breeze rumples those collards, Miller thinks wind, not earth. He’s a kite man.

Howell fetches a bucket of mulch from the compost pile and begins spreading it with a three-prong hand rake. Wearing pastel-colored golf shirts, she and Rhodes mound last year’s leaf fall around knee-high tomato seedlings.

“Ah, see that little earthworm there,” Rhodes exclaims. “That’s a sign the soil is good.” Then she gasps as the worm wriggles more. “Ooooh, look at that boy. He’s almost like a snake.”

It’s just them today. Nelson, they say, couldn’t make it. Her blood pressure has been up. And she hasn’t had the fire for gardening this year.

“Her husband died at Christmas,” Rhodes says. “She just doesn’t seem interested in a lot of things. I understand that.”

Nelson’s husband was a fixture in this garden. “Even when he got sick again, he would help haul wood chips from the walkway,” Rhodes says. “He was a good man. And a good friend.”

Rhodes, who has been a widow for nearly 30 years, says her husband never really gardened “unless you count mowing the lawn.” For her, the garden is rich with memories of her youth on a farm in what is now the Cascade section of Atlanta. “My mother always had four rows,” she says. “And those rows were from here to Jericho. I grew up in that garden.”

Rhodes mulches in silence. Then she looks over her shoulder and admires her handiwork. “We don’t think about the past that much,” she says. “We try to live forward.”

Rhodes and Howell settle back into their lawn chairs, perched atop the cement pad that Christian Towers management laid just for them. They watch Miller’s kite swerve violently right, then left. It takes a nosedive into the ground and cracks. Miller retreats to a picnic table and patiently sets about fixing it.

He says he made his first ones with sticks and newspaper, as a youngster in North Carolina. Time wore on. He stopped flying them. Then, more than a decade ago, he had a heart attack. He rediscovered what makes him tick. And it wasn’t the pacemaker.

Miller releases the white kite, and it darts back into the sky.

Howell points out all the blue tape and white medical bandages that festoon electric wires and branches around the property. Kite tails, all of them. “These evergreen trees have eaten at least 20 kites,” Howell says. Normally she and Rhodes don’t like clutter around the garden. But this is different.

“That’s OK,” Howell says. “He loves it.”

Elderly kite fliers are like elderly gardeners. They’re young at heart.

Summer: Bounty and loss

The three women sit in their usual spots under the dogwood tree, admiring the fruits of their labor. They’ve hit the garden early, as usual, to beat the June sun.

The tomato plants have snaked up their stakes, making a jungle out of an entire row. The okra is shoulder high, with yellow flowers. Butter peas and string beans round out the bounty.

Nelson is making a rare appearance. Gardening brings her back to those days as a child in Eatonton, where her grandmother grew collards as big as elephant ears and heads of lettuce that could fill an entire bucket.

Problem is, the garden reminds her of her husband, too.

“I miss him, period,” she says. “We all have to die. It’s just one of those things. It’s hard.”

Howell says after her husband of 43 years died, she could barely muster four tomato plants in their backyard garden. Sometimes, it’s best to let the land lie fallow.

Howell took up gardening late in life. Growing up, her address changed practically every year, as the family followed her father to each new job. “I was going to marry a grocery bag boy so I could stay in one place,” Howell says.

Instead, she wed an industrial boiler engineer. They moved across the country – 22 times. When they finally settled down, in Plymouth, N.C., Howell’s husband could at last practice his hobby. He loved flowers, particularly roses. “He’d plant dahlia bulbs as big as dinner plates.”

Howell learned to garden alongside him, only she planted vegetables. At long last, she was able to put down roots.

Then Howell’s husband died. She moved to Christian Towers to be close to her children, her grandchildren and, now, her great-grandchildren. But she wasn’t completely comfortable until five years ago. The garden — it has made this place home.

Fall: Harvest and hope

Howell can see her own breath as she stoops over a pile of uprooted okra. Her coat is zipped up all the way.

Though the mercury dipped into the 30s two nights earlier, the garden is still bursting with tomatoes, okra and a fresh row of turnip greens.

“Look at that,” Howell says in awe. “Middle of October.”

“It’s hard to beat last year’s,” Rhodes says from a few rows over. “But it did. It’s beaten last year’s.”

Their freezers are stuffed with the season’s harvest: lightly fried okra, butter peas, field peas, zipper peas, tomato and okra, green beans, turnip salad and an eight-vegetable soup mix that will last all winter.

But for all the excitement the garden has brought, Howell says she’s actually ready for a break. “It’s getting to the point where the work is kicking in,” Howell says. “You’re ready for that lull.”

Before the first frost, the women will pick what’s left and make fried green tomatoes for everyone. Then, in late November, they’ll gather up the leaves from the nearby oaks and spread them over the rows.

But come spring, as the ground warms, three gardening buddies will undoubtedly return to the fertile shadows of Christian Towers. They’ll put trowels in the ground, then seed. They’ll trade stories about last year’s garden. It’ll be hard to beat, they’ll say.

Then the women will sit in the lawn chairs and hope. Maybe, just maybe, this will be the best garden yet.