Hommel Mangas
June 2024 was a month of non-stop busyness. I will most definitely have a serious sit-down with the woman who schedules my calendar.
The Great Lakes Hosta Tailgate and auction was the second week of June.
The American Conifer Society Convention was held in Cincinnati the third week — just a two-hour hop, skip and a jump.
One revelation after touring a variety of private gardens and then touring Spring Grove Cemetery and Arboretum was that the last time I toured Spring Grove was a mere 40 years ago for an American Cemetery Association Convention when I was in my 20s. The 750-acre garden (400 developed) serves as a Level III horticultural education facility and is home to 1,300 different labeled trees and shrubs.
Thirty are State Champion trees — largest known trees of its species. A 400-year-old Quercus alba (white oak) has stood for more than two centuries before the cemetery was founded in April of 1844. I think Spring Grove was where I fell deeply in love with trees, back 1984.
The fourth week, I traveled 944 miles with my friend Carol Youngblood, driving through Ohio and New York to our destination in Marlborough, Massachusetts. It was a mere 14-hour, 9-minute drive to the American Hosta Convention, where we toured private gardens, partook in a clam-bake and visited Cochato Nursery in Holbrook, Massachusetts, and Mason Hollow Nursery in Mason, New Hampshire. Those were nurseries we had only read, heard and dreamed about.
While others took an extra day to visit mansions and go whale-watching, Carol and I visited the Orchard House and Garden in Concord, Massachusetts — a Registered National Historic Landmark and where Louisa May Alcott wrote “Little Women.” Also nearby, we felt compelled to visit the stretch along Battle Road, where the famous “Midnight Ride of Paul Revere” came to an end at 1:30 a.m. on April 19, 1775.
Since it was a 100-bazillion degrees out, we contemplated from afar and just drove by Henry David Thoreau’s Walden’s Pond. But we did make the walking trek through Sleepy Hollow Cemetery up to the Author’s Ridge where many famous 19th century authors are buried, including Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and Nathaniel Hawthorne. I loved the sight of multitudes of pencils placed at the grave-sites by visitors to honor the authors.
The fifth and final weekend was included my three daughters driving me down to an Airbnb on the river across from Madison, Indiana, where we dined together, watched the barges float by, shopped and laughed. I did find four-foot pencils that I suggested to my daughters they might like to purchase to lay on my grave upon my passing — they declined. But it was the perfect weekend to end June.
And as Dorothy once said about returning from her adventure to the Land of Oz: “There’s no place like home.”
Janet Hommel Mangas grew up on the east side of Greenwood. The Center Grove area resident and her husband are the parents of three daughters. Send comments to [email protected].
