Becoming a Master Gardener
by
Christi Sweaney
continued from
page one
The classroom was like many others
you’ve seen complete with tables and chairs and a screen for Power Point
presentations.
The students were much different
than the students with whom I had been spending the past few semesters.
The students at MSU talked about the parties they had been to the night
before and how they couldn’t believe they got home without throwing up
more than once. Many times I witnessed their disgust at the announcement
of homework or an upcoming test. I felt out of place dressed in my normal
attire, i.e. something other than my pajamas. The ratio of students who
didn’t want to be there far outweighed those who did.
The students of the Master
Gardener class were just a bunch of boring grownups who came to class
dressed in things like slacks or jeans or even, shudder, skirts. I didn’t
see one person wearing something that looked like pajamas. We were like
other students in the way we all sat in the same chairs every day we came
for each of the eleven classes we attended. I’m sure the two days we met
at a different library we looked like lost children. I spoke with other
students who where disappointed by the lack of testing of the knowledge we
were gaining and I found myself almost missing the nightly torture of
doing homework that would be graded. We all wanted to be there and we
wanted to learn. About dirt. What a bunch of geeks.
The director of the Master
Gardener program was a horticulturist named Gaylord Moore, who, it turned
out, is a native from Houston, Missouri, a mere smidge of a trot away from
my hometown of Willow Springs. He mentioned in class one day about making
a trip to Willow Springs to visit with a farmer about his land. Why I
admit to things like knowing of someone named Pig Paul, I don’t know, but
I did. I suppose it did give Gaylord something by which to remember me.
This was Gaylord’s last class and he will be retiring in the fall. He
attended every class and was like our mentor. He was a true country boy
and he made my think of my grandfather.
The different classes included
Basic Botany (this one came the closest to being a standard college
class), Landscape & Design, Vegetable Gardening, Annuals & Perennials (my
favorite), Trees in the Landscape and others that discussed insects and
other plant problems. Each class had its own assigned professional who
spoke. Two I enjoyed a lot were the tag team of ladies who taught the
Trees in the Landscape class. Both were funny and entertaining, which
makes presentations like this – the three hours, two days a week kind –
much easier to sit through. I was actually surprised by the ability of
all the speakers to keep the group’s attention. I’m sure there are many
of you who would look at the schedule and tremble with delight at the
Understanding Insects class, but I went into this gig wanting to know more
about planting flowers, and lots of them, and since I was here, maybe a
few vegetables. I really didn’t think I cared about bugs or botany, but
it turns out, they are pretty important parts of gardening and I was able
to learn a lot because the speakers weren’t reading everything off their
Power Point presentations or talking like a Conehead from Saturday Night
Live. They were funny, knowledgeable and they didn’t act like a Ph. D
teaching a general education class. They wanted to be there as much as I
did.
The Ozarks suffered a horrible ice
storm in January 2007, so repair and replace were big topics of
discussion throughout the course. I learned how to trim a tree, or at
least I learned how to instruct my husband on how to trim a tree. I
learned that no matter how much I didn’t want to cut down the sugar maple
in the back yard that really looked sort of okay with only a few branches
left, it was actually not a keeper because it would eventually succumb to
its injuries and would never look pretty again. I learned that the grubs
I’ve been throwing over the neighbor’s fence might have been good
butterfly larvae. I learned that the reason my maple in the front yard
has looked so puny for the past couple of years might just be because it
has bugs eating, or boring, on the inside of the bark. You see, you can’t
know that unless you know what to look for because they’re on the
inside. Get it? I wasn’t that interested in fruit trees, but after
the Fruit Crops class I did start to think that maybe I would plant a
blackberry bush. I learned that what I plant doesn’t have to go into the
ground in the perfect place. If I don’t like it, I can move it or give it
away and plant something new. I learned that if it dies, plant something
else. Mourn it and move on.
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