UMass Magazine Online

Winter 2005

Departments

Extended Family

Features

A Fruitful Partnership

A New Kind of Farm a New Breed of Farmer

Dear One Absent This Long While

Extended Family

Ambition in Spades
Bernie Conway ’02 digs his job at the New York Botanical Garden

–Deb Klenotic




	When the New York Botanical Garden offered Turners Falls native Bernie Conway ’02 a job, he moved to the city. “The fact that I’m down here still amazes me. But I don’t know if I’ll ever become a New Yorker. They drive like crazy here.” (photo by Ben Barnhart)

AS WALKERS RECUPERATE ON BENCHES and parents tote wilted children to the parking lot, a husky guy in a black T-shirt and green chinos walks with a sturdy farmer’s stride down the boulevard at the main entrance of the New York Botanical Garden. His high cheekbones and straight nose are sunburned.

Bernie Conway ’02 greets me with an impulsive hug. In his delighted smile there seems an extra fondness for an emissary from the Pioneer Valley, his home.

“I put my T-shirt over my uniform, since I’m off duty now,” he says conscientiously. “Should we take a walk?”

Choosing a path bordered with beds of black-eyed susans and coneflowers that could pass for deep-pink shuttlecocks, we head in the direction of the Everett Children’s Adventure Garden. It’s just one of 48 gardens, collections and seasonal exhibits on the New York Botanical Garden’s 250 acres of verdure in the Bronx. More than 150,000 plants are grown and cared for each year here. Last spring, when he was two years out of the Stockbridge School, Conway joined the garden’s staff of 500 employees as a botanical garden aide, helping maintain the feature gardens.

“The fact that I’m down here still amazes me,” the 30-year-old Turners Falls native says on this August afternoon. As we walk, Conway talks about what it’s like to get a work boot in the door of one of the premier public gardens in the country, interrupting himself at times to point out hidden sights his detail-oriented eye doesn’t miss: a robin’s nest hidden in a catalpa, a baby rabbit under a leaf.

He spent his first day at the garden, he recalls, “working in the day-daff [day lily/daffodil] walk, deadheading foliage on daffodils. I couldn’t believe I was here. I was thinking, wow, I always wanted to work in a public garden, and now I am.”

Digging deeper into his new job, he soon took out about 15,000 tulips along the seasonal walk by the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory. “That’s all I did for a week—dig up tulips,” says Conway. “Then I put in four or five rings of perennials,” preparing the seasonal walk for the many weddings that take place summertime.

Now, with the season at its ripest, Conway is doing “the typical summer things you’d do in a garden: weeding and other maintenance—lots of it.” He gets around the beds and borders in motorized Cushman carts loaded with border forks, scuffle hoes, rakes, shovels, brooms, blowers, and Positron water wands.

Today he spent his monthly weekend shift helping the rose curator deadhead 83 beds of roses for fall bloom in the Peggy Rockefeller Rose Garden and watering plants in the “prop range,” the area of glasshouses and hoop houses where all the plants in the Garden are propagated.

We enter the children’s garden. Kids play around a giant topiary frog and caterpillars caught in mid-frolic at a pool with outsized lily pads. “One thing I’ve learned,” Conway says, “is just how closely the plants are spaced for display.” Pausing before some of his handiwork, he tells me. “These banana trees and canna, for example. I took them out of the glass house, brought them here, took them out of their containers, dug holes pretty close to each other, and planted them. They’ll go back to the prop range for the winter.”

Was he worried that he’d break one while planting it?

He laughs. “No. Nothing I’m doing is completely brand-new to me,” he says, as matter-of-factly as if his job were to make coffee. “A lot of it is practical horticulture things I learned at Stockbridge and during my internships at the Hadley Garden Center and Tower Hill Botanical Garden. I also picked up a lot from my grandparents in Turners Falls. But I do something different and learn something every day, like using a board when turning the soil, so you don’t compact it, and how to use certain tools in certain gardens. The gardeners here are full of knowledge.

“My job is to work with them in whatever garden they’re in,” he continues, pointing to a woodpecker high above. “I dig holes, plant, weed, mulch, prune, water. A lot of little tedious tasks, but without them, the plants wouldn’t look as beautiful as they do. I don’t know what I’ll be doing from one day to the next; the managers plan everything and then call and give us our instructions. There are so many gardens, I could be anywhere.”

Conway has already seen many, though not all, of the gardens and collections of his spectacular new place of employment. Asked which is his favorite so far, he responds. “That’s a tough one. The children’s garden, the rock garden, the rose garden, the seasonal garden, others. And I love the conservatory. There you can see your house plants, the tropical plants we all buy back home for indoors, and see how they can look, in their full size, in the right conditions.”

[top of page]

In Memoriam

Chairman of the Gourd

Chairman of the Gourd: more images

Winning the Peace

Winning the Peace: more images

The Neighborhood Gourmet

The Neighborhood Gourmet: larger image

The Great Transgene Escape

Ambition in Spades

Ambition in Spades: larger image