Print

Email story

Comment

Email editor

A gardener cultivated by his plants

Clearwater resident Lee Bostick has reaped the benefits of a life rich in gardening.

By NICOLE JOHNSON
Published July 24, 2005

Lee Bostick isn't a master gardener - not, at least, in any official sense.

But he knows the best way to care for a fruit tree is to fertilize the soil all the way out as far out as the branches grow.

A little frost never hurt a collard.

And while growing things in Florida is as sure and natural as new teeth in a baby's mouth, it is a gift to be cherished.

"To plant a seed in the ground and see it produce is divine," Bostick said.

The 60-year-old Clearwater resident has gardened for most of his life. These days, Bostick spends his mornings working maintenance at the Pinellas County Botanical Gardens at Pinewood Cultural Park in Largo.

Walk by Bostick as he's stooped over in his brown uniform, and you might think he's there just to pull the weeds. You wouldn't know there's 50 years of wisdom in his hands about the things that can be coaxed from the earth.

Growing up in Clearwater, while most school children were ripping and running after the school bell rang, Bostick would slip away and tend to a corner of earth just beside Miss Jimmy-Lee's garden. Bostick's parents rented an apartment from her on Missouri Avenue.

At 10, he grew black-eyed peas.

"I didn't know what I was doing, I just wanted me a little garden like Miss Jimmy-Lee's," Bostick recalls. "But those were the prettiest little peas."

At the Botanical Gardens, Bostick hauls mulch from one end of the 180-acre garden to the other, rips weeds from jasmine bushes and strings up droopy trees along ponds.

The park features hundreds of exotic and native plants and flowers. Pink bougainvillea pop in a portion of the garden next to a walkway lined with slumped banana trees, waxy pineapple bushes and spiny papaya trees.

Though it may look like there is little rhyme or reason to the organization of the garden, there are staff horticulturists and master gardeners here that do much planning and planting.

For the most part, Bostick keeps his knowledge of the earth tucked away. But at times, it finds its way out.

"I believe there are some things you can teach and others that you can't," Bostick says, striking the farmer's pose: one hand on his hip, the other arm extended out gripping a pitch fork stabbing the ground. "If you want a plant to sprout out you trim ... but how much you trim is a feeling you get, not what a book says to trim."

The book-smart ones know him and trust his judgment.

"He's one of those folks from history that has always been involved with gardening," said Vernon Bryant, director of horticulture at the gardens. "It's just in him."

As a teen, Bostick spent summers on his knees in the soil helping his father, George, a contractor for local nurseries.

The Florida afternoon sun was not kind. But it was then, Bostick said he recognized being a gardener is much like an artist who feels compelled to sketch or a dancer who needs to move.

"You don't just love it, you're born with it," said Bostick, a slight-framed man with gray hair and glossy eyes. "It's got to be brought out of you and then you can't stop doing it."

But there was a time when he did stop.

Newly married in the late 1960s, Bostick remembers taking some seasons off from the garden to care for his wife, Helen, who was suffering from kidney disease.

The 20-something couple would drive to Gainesville every week so Helen could see doctors at Shands Hospital. That left little time to tend to a garden the right way.

She eventually got better. The couple had two children. And Bostick got back to gardening.

In 1990, he and his wife moved to Youngstown, Ohio. There he worked for Kmart and did some home remodeling on the side with his brother. He even established and pastored a church.

But ask him what he remembers fondly about his time there and he doesn't pause.

"The lettuce."

It was his first time growing it. And even though he isn't a big hamburger fan, the couple had them at least a couple times a week just because of that lettuce.

"In Ohio, we had two gardens, one at mine and one at my brother's house," Bostick recalls. "Every two or three days, I'd fill up a garbage bag of greens and give them away.

"Collard green leaves as big as your head," he recalls with a chuckle.

There were also cucumbers, zucchini, crook neck squash, tomatoes, bell peppers, lettuce, Kentucky Wonders green beans and jalapeno peppers.

When it was time to move back to Florida to see his four grandchildren grow up in 2003, Bostick sold his house to Paul Saayd, because he knew would watch after the garden - the right way.

No fertilizer. No pesticides. Lots of water.

He has never been stingy with his gardening secrets.

He gets giddy describing plans for this year's garden. He plans to lay his mulch, cover it with plastic for three weeks and then till it before he plants a seed.

And yes, he does talk to his plants. He compliments the flowers' beauty and progress on a daily basis.

But he doesn't dare utter a word to the vegetables.

Considering their fate, he said, it just wouldn't be right.

"They'd probably look up at me and say, "Black man speak with false tongue."'

Nicole Johnson can be reached at 727 771-4303 or njohnson@sptimes.com

For more information on the Pinellas County Extension Office and the Florida Botanical Gardens, go to http://coop.co.pinellas.fl.us/ or call 727 582-2200.

[Last modified July 24, 2005, 00:22:18]