Life and Lifestyles

Remembering a woman who loved Ocracoke and loved her garden

By SHARON THOMPSON

“Fill your garden with memories of people who
have given you plants and shared your passion."
— Margot Rochester

It was the perfect ending to a celebration of Margot Rochester’s life — a group of friends gathered in her garden after her memorial service. Outside the family room’s French doors, a prized lespedeza bush, smothered in purple-pink blooms, arched over the steps. Burgundy castor bean plants stood tall behind it, and just beyond, bright yellow cassia blooms wrangled for our attention.

The back border beckoned, so we made our way across a narrow spit of lawn onto a new stone pathway that leads to a new stone patio. Both had been on Margot’s “to do” list for a long time. The projects were just completed in August, and pieces of pennyroyal already were creeping between the stones, just as she had envisioned. A bench invited guests to linger among the blooms of Mexican sunflower, salvias and mums. Bees covered fatsia’s Sputnik-like flowers; butterflies investigated the blossoms of Miss Huff lantana.

It was a scene Margot would have loved — friends enjoying the beauty and bounty of her garden.

Along the edge of the patio, Margot’s garden kneeler awaited her return — no doubt right where she left it before she headed to Oregon in mid-September. Although she loved to travel, she loved getting home to see what had happened during her absence. She would have knelt down and reached through foliage, searching for a piece of plant to pot up or snipping a few wayward stems.

That was Margot — always looking forward to the next season and always preparing to share her garden’s largesse.

Our friendship began about 10 years ago while working on a Master Gardener project. I remember her first as the woman who always brought young plants to give away at meetings. She was pretty bossy about it, too: “Here, take this, you’ll like it.” She was right — I usually did.

She was crazy about Joe Pye weed, sedums, wood poppies, salvias, orange geums, cyclamen, lespedeza, castor beans and elephant ears. She loved mulching with newspapers (eight layers, please), coastal Bermuda hay (no weed seeds) and turning her kitchen scraps into compost without benefit of a designated compost pile.

In her columns, lectures, books and conversations, she embellished her gardening recommendations with humor: “Abundant foliage, like a muumuu, covers many faults.” And she often side-dressed her counsel with slow-release observations on life: “Plants do not know the rules or restrictions and are willing to do the best they can wherever they are. Good advice for us all.”

For Margot, gardening was a metaphor for life. She took cues from her 30 years of teaching high school, where she was highly respected by colleagues and students, into the garden: “In teaching and life in general, we learn from our failures but wisely focus on our successes. That is where the fun is.”

And Margot wanted everyone to have as much fun as she was having. Whether it was discovering a new plant, a new friend or a new travel adventure — she wanted to share her joy.

Margot’s shoes, usually sandals, were filled with sand. After her first trip to England in 2000 to visit famous gardens, she immediately organized a similar trip for 30 Master Gardeners the following year.

When she felt the tug of Tuscany, she found a group of folks headed that way and joined them. She made trips to France and Spain in recent years but equally embraced any sort of stateside travel, whether it was to Monticello, S.C., or Monticello, Va. Heck, she even embraced a trip down a water slide with two of her grandchildren this summer!

We lived about 50 miles apart, so visiting between our gardens didn’t happen often, but we e-mailed daily, sharing gardening info, family dilemmas or planning our next expedition. Early on I was privy to her garden remarks, always delivered in her trademark cheery voice: “You should see my geums! They are no longer blooming, but boy, what a mass they have formed.”

I miss Margot most in the mornings when I turn on the computer and her reassuring e-mail is not there. But then I walk around my garden, and she is everywhere — thanks to all those plants she insisted I take over the years.

Margot’s enthusiastic, generous spirit was evident in everything she did and to everyone she met. She treasured her friends and family and told them so often. Her can-do attitude about life in and out of the garden energized those around her. By her own admission: “I am in the league of optimists in the world, in the garden and anywhere else I happen to be.”

(Editor’s note: Margot Rochester, a Master Gardener and writer, died from pancreatic cancer Oct. 28. She lived in Lugoff, S.C., but loved Ocracoke. She and her husband, Dick, owned a home there for many years. She was involved in the community and wrote gardening columns and other features for The Island Breeze for a dozen years. Her second book, “Down to Earth: Practical Thoughts for Passionate Gardeners,” published by Taylor Trade, will arrive in bookstores in January. This tribute was written by her gardening colleague and good friend, Sharon Thompson, and was first published in The State newspaper in South Carolina. Master gardener Sharon Thompson has been gardening since moving to the Midlands in 1978.)