BRATTLEBORO — On Sept. 10, volunteers planted a welcome garden at Exit 1 as the first stage of the Exit 1 Gateway Project, the idea of our group of concerned citizens who joined this summer to initiate a movement for greater beautification and maintenance of the town's landscape with citizen participation.
We adopted Exit 1 as our first project because it has been an under-recognized area of great importance.
As the first exit in Vermont, Exit 1 serves as a primary gateway to both our town and our state. And we felt that the business owners on Canal Street, with all their importance to the town's economy, could only benefit from an effort to make the approach to their district as attractive as possible.
Our garden got planted in the face of the major disruption of Tropical Storm Irene - a testimony to the spirit of our community.
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During August, we made plans and a schedule for putting in our garden. On Aug. 27, we all had a good time breaking ground and preparing the plot.
The next day, Irene hit.
As the news of the flooding started to come in, we realized that our plans were now completely disrupted.
We had no dirt or fertilizer yet at the site. We had planned to circulate that coming Monday a fundraising letter to the business owners on Canal Street, as some of them had shown tentative interest in helping us buy the plants we needed.
Now it seemed completely inappropriate to seek such donations. We were enthused about our garden project, but what did that matter in the face of the huge immediate needs of our neighbors and fellow citizens - downtown, in surrounding towns, statewide?
We thought that we should probably suspend our plans for the garden indefinitely.
It surprised us on Sept. 1, when we discovered that Brattleboro Memorial Hospital had planted the triangular median at the bottom of the northbound ramp with perennials.
Earlier that summer, we had asked the hospital, which maintains beautiful landscaping along its section of Canal Street, to consider helping us spruce up the area; they had kindly responded by offering to landscape and maintain one of the medians.
In the midst of the recovery effort, we had not expected that hospital staff would make those flowers appear. Seeing them planted and mulched on the median made us happy and inspired us.
And so we began to think about going ahead with our plans.
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We were hearing a lot about a resilient, hardy spirit that was blooming all over the state as people were joining in the recovery effort. Gov. Peter Shumlin, and others, kept speaking loud and clear about the “people of Vermont” and the awesome initiatives they were taking on their own, before any outside help arrived, to get themselves and their neighbors and their homes and enterprises back up and running.
We kept thinking about tired, muddy, wet people mucking out basements and scraping mud from parking lots, people saving pictures that the floods had taken from their neighbors' homes and strewn on the riverbanks, people with trucks and earth-moving equipment out toiling on the roads in dangerous conditions, day and night.
It occurred to us that just seeing a fresh, new flower bed at such a time might cheer a person up when driving through Exit 1.
We began to envision the flowers we might plant as flags announcing Vermont's refusal to back down in the face of disaster.
We saw these flowers as banners announcing to visitors: We have got our act together. We stand as ready as we always have to lift your spirits with our hospitality, in this special place where your soul can relax. We're not forgetting to keep it beautiful.
With this inspiration, we decided that we would do whatever it took to get that little garden planted as soon as we could.
But how to do it?
People were way too busy and exhausted to even be asked. For example, the Hamiltons, a local farming family, who had invited us to come and help ourselves to as much manure and soil as we wanted, were now completely cut off; the bridge to their farm was washed out. Anyone who had a truck or had dirt, we knew, was working flat out on recovery; we simply could not bother them.
We were at our wits' end.
Then, on Sept. 5, a good-sized pile of dark loam magically appeared at the site. It was a load of alpaca manure, a donation from Michael Olson, owner of Mystic Meadow Farm in West Brattleboro. Having not forgotten the commitment he had made before the storm to bring it over, he had dropped it off for us. We rejoiced.
The next day, without notice, another pile appeared. It had to be from the LaRock Brothers, contractors from Guilford, who had promised before the storm to bring a load of dirt to us - a donation.
The following morning, Sept. 7, Art Greenbaum of GPI Construction, Inc. on Canal Street donated to us the total amount of our budget to buy plants, on behalf of himself and other business owners on Canal Street, so that we could go ahead on schedule.
When he told us of his decision, Art said, “If there was ever a time when this was really needed, it is now.”
Grateful for this blessing and support from Art, we planted the garden three days later, on Sept. 10, the day we'd originally planned.
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With these acts, which struck us as a series of small miracles, these members of our community came through - because they had a commitment to keep, and because they felt that a week after a disaster was an excellent time to plant a welcome garden.
Tropical Storm Irene forced our group to reconceive that garden in a special way, as a symbol of the great spirit of our neighbors and fellow citizens in Vermont in the midst of a hard struggle.
Thanks to our community acting as they did, the garden that has been planted is far more than a symbol. It is literally a result of that spirit.