By Lorri Carlson
The month of March has always been associated with my grandma's and my celebration of the aging process together, our birthdays being only one week apart. A few years ago March also became the month that stirs the dormant gardener in my soul. I had the privilege of working at Watters Garden Center for one growing season.
My employers, Harold and Lorna Watters, arrived in Prescott in 1962, true to the pioneer ambition; their covered station wagon pulled a borrowed trailer and tools. With a young family to feed, the couple worked diligently in their own landscaping business and by 1964 the Watters opened the Prescott area's "first year-round nursery."
From the late 1960s until 1983, Watters Garden Center could be found on Plaza Drive across from Plaza Bowl. They have been doing business on on Iron Springs Road ever since with many of the same customers they had in 1964.
Our contemporary understanding of gardening also arrived in the Prescott in the '60s, the 1860s that is, a full century before the Watters family. The Territorial Women's Memorial Rose Garden at Sharlot Hall Museum honors Arizona's female pioneers.
Obviously, many of these ladies had subsistence issues motivating them to garden. It is also apparent; however, that some of the territorial women found great pleasure in the act of planting something and nurturing its growth.
Margaret Griffiths Hunt McCormick, married to the second governor of the Arizona Territory, is known for her love of growing roses, but she truly loved the act of gardening itself. She died in 1867, at the age of 23, quite young to have developed such an appreciation and devotion.
Hester Elvira Shook Travis arrived in Prescott in 1899, at the age of 42. By 1904, Hester and her husband, Charles, built a home at 120 Park Ave. Hester also loved roses, a passion which resulted in a garden that included many varieties of these lovely flowers. Hester exemplified the meaning of a friendship garden. She shared her flowers with friends and family, letting them propagate rose bushes from her own.
Ida Elizabeth Hester Smith Genung and her husband, Charles, arrived at Walnut Grove in 1870. Among her many talents, Ida was known for providing delicious fresh vegetables in the meals she shared with travelers. , which made the Genung home a very popular stopping point for the road weary.
Another popular home among travelers belonged to Marjorie Ann Dickinson Back and her husband, William Beriman. The Backs married at Oak Creek in 1878, and resided at the Montezuma Well Ranch on Beaver Creek for many years.
Mary Elizabeth Francisco Averyt Flumerfelt developed a love of roses and gardening at a very young age. Mary arrived with the Bashford family in 1891, at the age of 19. She married Alfred Wheeler Averyt in 1895, and the two built a home at 230 S. Pleasant St. MAry had a rose garden that brought her great joy.
Ida Mae Finch Redden, not a resident of Yavapai County, but certainly a pioneer woman of the Arizona Territory, lived with her husband on their ranch south of Tempe. Ida loved growing flowers, especially sweet peas and roses. Her garden must have brought a lovely scent to the desert in spring.
Samantha "Mantra" Earnes DeArmond moves to Stanton, Arizona in 1903, with her husband, Jasper. The couple moved to Peeples Valley in 1909, and then to Skull Valley in 1912, where Manta pursued her love of gardening for 32 years.
Dorothy Elaine Manley McMullen was a passionate gardener who was recognized publicly with many awards. Dorothy became an accredited rose show judge with the National Growers Association. She was an active member of the Prescott Garden Club and the Alta Vista Garden Club. Dorothy contributed her skills to designing the Territorial Women's Rose Garden.
Sharlot Mabridth Hall, founder of the museum, also had a love for gardening. In April 1933, Sharlot wrote to her friend, Alice Hewins, of the work she had already completed. She had set out "canterbury bells, foxglove, and shasta daisies." Due to the cold spring that year, Sharlot expressed her disappointment at the lack of green. She was quite concerned about the low price of vegetables at the time because that meant that growers in the valley were hardly getting a return on the cost of their seeds. Just the day before, Sharlot had purchased 20 pounds of carrots for a dime, all to feed her ladt deer that lived here on the grounds of the Governor's Mansion.
That same month, Sharlot wrote to the owner of a seed company, a Mr. Parks, who advertized in Better Homes and Gardens magazine. It was the same company her mother ordered from years before. She explained that she no longer had the family farm, Orchard Ranch, but was "busy restoring the home of Arizona's first governor and making the grounds as beautiful as conditions permitted.
Sharlot continued by explaining the unique conditions here. She wrote, "We are at an altitude of nearly six thousand feet [sic] and have a late spring, seldom planting before the tenth of May. June is hot and dry but July usually brings a showery season which may last through August. Autumn is usually warm and delightful till the end of October when frosts and even snows may come. The winteres have a good deal of snow but the cold seldom goes much below zero.
Sharlot then described her experimentation with flowers that are "suited to a dry climate and those hardy and easy to grow...dahlias, bulb plants, and all perennials not needing moist atmosphere do well here. Our native flowers are largely bulb varieties and hardy perennials to such annuals as verbenas, gaillardias, coreopsis, and a few others are wild here in various modest forms."
Sharlot concluded her letter by expressing the sentiment of many gardeners, "I attend to the yard and garden myself at least directing it all and try to give things a fair chance to thrive."
My job at the garden center introduced me to the community of gardeners. They are a special group of people with differences as vast as the type of plants they tend to, yet I observed some intriguing similarities. They work hard at something that appears to be a leisure activity, something that can not be rushed. Gardeners visit a nursery with expectations of nurturing something living, arriving with hope and anticipation.
Rarely do gardeners exhibit the frustration and anxiety of those of us who must visit an auto mechanic or schedule a plumber to pay their respects in our home. This atmosphere contributed to my delight in getting to work with both plants and people for one short season of my life, and it all began in the month of March.
Lorrie Carlson is Assistant Archivist at the Sharlot Hall Museum.
Sharlot Hall Museum Photograph Call Number: (). Reuse only by permission.
Sharlot M. Hall tends to one of her plants that is growing beside the Governor's Mansion in the late 1930s. For the author, and many others in Prescott's past and present, March has become the month that stirs the dormant gardener in our souls.