Transcription of Rodney Eason for the show Maine Lands #191
Lisa: It is a much smaller world that we often realize. I know this in fact through social media, because for quite a while I followed an individual on Instagram who is the Director of Horticulture at the Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens. However, we had never met and I had never thought about actually meeting him until we came up this idea for a show and we said we need to get Rodney Eason in here. That’s indeed what we have done. Today I’m speaking with Rodney Eason, who is the Director of Horticulture at the Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens. He lives in East Boothbay with his wife, Carrie, and their four children, including a set of twins.
Rodney: That’s right. Thanks for having me.
Lisa: Thanks for coming in, and thanks for moving to Maine. You’re actually not from here. You were born in Raleigh, North Carolina?
Rodney: That’s right.
Lisa: I’m sure I did not pronounce that with the correct southern accent.
Rodney: When you say North Carolina, it sort of turns into an F, so people say Norf Carolina a lot. Raleigh can be pronounced a lot of different ways. I’m sure your listeners are going where did you find this guy from with this accent, but it’s great being here. There are many more southerners in Maine than one might imagine, and we seem to meet each other, which is great.
Lisa: It’s always funny for me because John McCain is our audio producer and he spent quite a lot of time in Hawaii, but he also has connections all over the world. We will have people come in here and they will also have lived in Hawaii or they’ll have a connection with Germany. I think Maine does kind of collect people with interesting backgrounds,
Rodney: It does. I think a lot of it has to do with just the terrain of Maine and the sort of unspoiled Walden-esque nature of Maine draws a lot of people, especially from the East Coast, because it’s that last piece of sort of unpreserved wilderness that one might imagine, and yet you can hop on 95 and get here. It does draw a lot of people to come and see the coastline and of course people want to see lobsters, and now they can see a botanical garden.
When I heard that there was a botanical garden in Maine, I thought you can grow blueberries and spruce trees, so what else can you do? After digging in further, there surely is a whole lot you can grow. Being in the gardens in the summer just shows us how many people come to our state. Hopefully more people will decide that it is a great place to live and it is a great place to retire or even move your family here like we did. We love it.
Lisa: I have spent time at the Botanical Gardens. Actually, I think it was several years ago there was an event that we went to, and I was impressed not just by the plants but also by the layout, by the sculptures, by the buildings. It really has this very beautiful flow to it when you’re walking around.
You’ve been working on a twenty year plan for the Botanical Gardens. Tell me what you’ve done so far and what you hope to be doing.
Rodney: Sure. With the gardens themselves, what you have seen thus far are the efforts of really about a ten year effort. The Gardens have only been open for eight years. We are one of the youngest botanical gardens in the United States. I think that’s what people are drawn to when they come to our gardens, is that they are extremely different than most other public gardens.
A lot of other public gardens in the United States are either replications of a French garden or an Italianate garden, which were more scaled for a king or an emperor or a ruler. Our gardens have none of that. It’s more of a people’s garden. It’s a place to meander, especially in the Garden of the Five Senses. It’s a place where people can explore. We actually have an area where there’s a reflexology labyrinth where we ask folks to please take your shoes off and walk on the stones and feel this, so it’s much difference experience than I’ve ever encountered in a public garden.
I think as we go forward one of the biggest things that we’ve talked about as a collective group, as an institutional body is that as we go forward in this master plan is that we don’t screw up, because Maine and the Maine coastline, especially in that Boothbay Harbor peninsula, is gorgeous in it’s own right. That, itself, can stand alone, but then when we insert this botanical garden it needs to be beautiful. It needs to be awe inspiring.
There was something that we talked about when I was at Longwood Gardens, that someone said as any garden goes forward what you would love to see is like open doors in the parking lot, where people get there and they forget to take their keys out and they forget to close their doors just because they’re so awestruck. I’m hoping that I’ll see that at Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens in the future, that there will be all these open doors in the parking lots and everybody will leave their keys just because they’re so excited to come in and see what we’re doing there.
Lisa: You’re also a very kid friendly location. When I was there at this event, and I think it’s like this all the time, there were children there with their parents. They were running forward on the paths. I think your plan is to maybe have some bicycles, if you don’t already, for the gardens?
When I think of botanical gardens, I do think of these sort of majestic places where you’re do not touch, but you’re very specifically asking people to touch and engage and bring your kids and be part of this.
Rodney: Absolutely. We don’t blatantly go out and say it, but we are proselytizing to the next generation of horticulturists and the next generation of nature lovers. I think the folks who live here and also the folks who vacation here with their children, they want to experience nature. I’ve met couples with young children from the Bronx or Brooklyn and they need to get out. They need to escape. They need to decompress. They need to not hear airplanes flying over their heads all day and the honk of taxicabs, so they get that.
When they come to the gardens, I see them relax. I see like the sun hits their face because they’re not in the concrete jungle and the tunnels of the skyscrapers and their kids can explore. I think that’s important not only for folks who visit, but for kids who grow up in Maine. Our kids tell us this all the time. They loved Pennsylvania, but they love Maine. They love being able to explore. They love being able to get out and get dirty in nature.
I think for us as a botanical garden, if we were to put up a do not pass this line sort of thing as a typical museum one might expect, it would destroy the whole premise of being in Maine. We have to make sure that as a cultural attraction in Maine along with all of the other cultural attractions that we make sure that people are enjoying what they see and that they want to come back. Not only do they want to come back, but when they get back to Brooklyn or they get back to Philadelphia they tell their friends, “Oh, you’re going to Maine? Make sure you go by and check out this garden in Boothbay.”
Lisa: Boothbay is an interesting place because it has this rich heritage of seagoing people and boats and going out to Monhegan, but it also has the Bigelow Labs. My son was up there two summers ago. I wrote an article about them for Maine Magazine. They actually have an affiliation with the Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens. I believe that you have summer interns that hang out with their summer interns and make that connection.
I think these types of connections are happening all over the place in Boothbay. Why is that? Why is there this interesting energy, the synergy of different sorts of people being brought together in Boothbay?
Rodney: I think you’re hitting on a great point. Folks who have grown up in Boothbay … I’ve sort of been told that means you either came over on a ship or you have native roots there. If you didn’t they tend to call everybody people from away. It’s funny to hear that. Going around the entire peninsula we see that we go from a population from Route 2 South to about … In January we probably have about six thousand residents and then in August we go up to about sixty to seventy thousand residents, so we need to stay close during the winter.
With nonprofits and other cultural attractions, it’s really this all boats float with the rising tide. The more that we share information, the more that we promote the next generation and the more that we talk between ourselves … For example I did a garden design for Bigelow for one of their courtyards around their new building. Here’s this gorgeous one-of-a-kind building, and I’m sure folks may sort of be taken aback when they go up the Wiscasset River, because its a beautiful modern building. There seems to be if it doesn’t have cedar shingles on it, it doesn’t fit in Maine. Yet I’m a modernist as well, so I really enjoy having that taste of modernism on the Maine coast.
To get back to your point, why make enemies in such a small area, in such a small state, when we can all work together to promote what we’re all trying to strive for? I see it as happiness. We’re all searching for happiness in life. It just depends on what people are looking for, whether it’s learning about the research that Bigelow is doing around the world and the oceans, or about the plant collections that we have at Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens, or all the trails that the Land Trust has on the Boothbay Peninsula.
It’s just a wonderful, wonderful place to explore and we have to work together.
Lisa: I also spent times at the Windjammer Days and I got to meet some people who I’m sure their families have been here for a least a couple hundred years anyway. They were very warm and welcoming and, “Thank you for coming to our town.” They were so proud of what Boothbay, East Boothbay, all of the surrounding towns have been and what they are becoming. I think that’s also a part of it. Even though you may be from away, if you’re brought into the fold and welcomed, that feels good.
Rodney: Yeah. I think that’s where it reminds me a bit of what the South was. There are vestiges of the South where there really are no enemies from a meet you on the street sort of thing. People know who you are. If you’re new in town, the word got out.
I remember when we were looking for a house and when we were first moving in my wife stopped by the bank to set up a checking account and a little kid walked up to her and said, “You must be Zoe’s mom.” She was taken aback. The kid said, “Yeah, our teacher told us that a new girl is moving in from the Philadelphia area.” It’s really a fun throwback experience.
Lisa: You have interesting connections in different places. You have an older brother who was born in Morocco. You met your wife, Carrie, during a college internship at Walt Disney World. You’ve spent time in Pennsylvania. You were the garden curator at Airlie Gardens in Wilmington, North Carolina. You mentioned the Longwood Gardens, and I guess this was the University of Delaware?
Rodney: That’s correct.
Lisa: You’ve been all over the place, and yet you found this place to put down your roots. Why?
Rodney: I think about this from time to time. I was counting this morning that Carrie and I have been married for seventeen years and we’ve moved nine times. For some people that would be … I think it would stress some people out, but Carrie and I tend to have that free spirit, and I think that’s why we were drawn to one another.
I never had left home really. I spent most of my time in North Carolina right around the Raleigh area. Then in college heading down to Florida was this first experience of leaving home. It’s funny, during orientation Walt Disney World at that time made all of their interns go through a two-day customer service training protocol. During one of the training sessions, Mickey Mouse actually walked in. There was a role playing, and he grabbed Carrie’s hand and then reached over and grabbed my hand. That was the first we had really noticed each other out of the group, so we love to say that Mickey Mouse actually introduced us.
Lisa: You were joined by Mickey? What better story is there than that really?
Rodney: Yep. Last winter to celebrate we had met twenty years ago, we took the whole family down to Disney World for a week. It was a fun time. He kids loved hearing all of our stories about remember weeding there? Do you remember planting that? It was good.
In terms of moving, I’m from the South and Carrie is from Pennsylvania. We’ve tried living in each other’s home states and we enjoyed living in North Carolina and we enjoyed living in Pennsylvania, but we decided let’s live somewhere else. Let’s live somewhere we enjoy visiting. We had vacationed in Maine a half dozen times. We have good friends up actually on Town Hill and on Mount Desert Island. We thought let’s live in Maine. It would be a great place to live and raise our kids, so here we are. We’re loving it.
We’ve been here two and a half years, which is the second longest we’ve ever lived in any one place. Another year and a half and we’ll break the record.
Lisa: That is the interesting thing about knowing you through Instagram, is seeing your eagerness to do the next thing. Spring is here, what are we doing next? I’m seeing how much you want to get your fingers into the soil.
I’m not really a plant person, so if I were to go to Walt Disney World it would all be kind of background for me. The gardens are beautiful but they’re background. When I started doing more photography, that was when I really started to notice plants and how unique they were, even amongst a species, the colors, the shapes. It’s truly amazing what can be produced out of a seed.
Rodney: Right. I love the analogy that plants, horticultural and gardening in itself could be called the slowest of the performing arts. From seed, to germination, to the plant and the flowering, everything takes on a different season. I love looking back over … I’ll take photographs now, so I’ll go out and photograph and document the garden, and then in June and then late summer and then into fall, with the beautiful fall color that we have.
It’s amazing to see in Maine from June until August how much the garden grows, how much it flowers and how the light changes and shows a lot of different aspects of the colors. Our colors are so rich up here. I think it has to do with the longer days and the different sun angles.
One of the things that we’re exploring this year at the gardens is that we’re working … We have a programmatic theme each summer, and this year our programmatic theme is Myth, Magic and Medicine Plants. I was actually doing some research last night on one plant in particular that we have coming in called a fish pepper, which is a variegated … the plant is variegated and the actual peppers are variegated and they’re hot.
The origins of the plant came from early African-American cooks who needed something spicy for fish dishes without throwing off the color, so they could cut up the white peppers and add those to the fish dishes or some sort of cream based sauce and make it spicy. You’re not expecting spice in that. I started thinking I wonder if you could add that to fish chowder and throw people off? They’re expecting the traditional New England fish chowder, and put some of the fish pepper in it and spice things up.
I could go on and on about all the little intricacies of plants and which are my favorite plants and which plants aren’t my favorite. As a group, when we get together … And then my wife says when I’m around my plant friends … She’s like, “I’m going to leave. All of the wives are going to go over here.” It’s kind of like when guys are watching football. My wife is like, “You guys talk your plants and we’re going to go here and talk about more important things.”
Lisa: Do tell me about some of your favorite plants, because I find this very interesting.
Rodney: I have to start with hydrangeas. You’re hard pressed to find people who don’t like hydrangeas, to the point they’re almost over-planted in the landscape. I think there’s a lot of different … When you start looking at the different types, like there’s the mop head, which is the big round sort of pompom type flowers. Then there are lace caps, which the flowers in the center are sterile, and they have the pink and the blue dots. Only the flowers on the outside are fertile, where they have both male and female parts. They sort of ring around it like Saturn’s rings around the planet.
Then you have newer introductions which are coming out of the South and different mountain type species. Then there are new species coming over from Asia. Plant breeders are sort of like the mad scientists and they’re coming up with new hydrangeas. We actually have a little fun hydrangea cross that we’re dreaming of doing in the future at Coastal Main Botanic Garden. It’s sort of like a perennial hydrangea, but it’s not in the hydrangea family. It’s smaller. We’d love to breed it with one of the big mop heads and have like a little bedding plant with giant blue flowers on it and just blow people away.
That’s one. Magnolias are the other. Again, that’s from the South. Southern magnolias were all around my house in our yard growing up. There are a lot of deciduous magnolias that you can grow up here in Maine. Believe me, I’ve tried growing southern magnolia up here and they don’t like our winters at all.
That’s one. Then I think moving over into the world of perennial plants, it would be hard for me to choose because my brain is sort of spinning around right now thinking what’s the plant of the moment? There’s a plant with the unfortunate name of sneeze weed. The reason it’s called sneeze weed is I guess in earlier times when we didn’t have modern medicine you could actually grind up the flowers and insert them up into your nose. The thought was that it would sort of expunge all the maladies that was causing you a headache or a stuffy nose, and that’s why they call it a sneeze weed, because that’s the reaction.
It has an ugly name, but the beauty of the plant is it has these disk flowers that are either yellow or orange and there are some bi-colors. There’s a great color that we have at the garden. It’s called Mardi Gras, and it is sort of like orange and red striped. People love it. We get so many questions about that plant.
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Lisa: You mentioned your theme this year, Myths, Magic and Medicine, which I find intriguing for lots of different reasons. You’re also doing a collaboration with Angela Adams and you’re doing a George Sherwood exhibition and you’re planning a winter light show?
Rodney: Yes.
Lisa: You’re really kind of trying to do new and interesting things with your gardens?
Rodney: Absolutely. As part of going through the master plan, we also looked at a cultural analysis where we worked with a firm from Canada, Lloyd Cultural Resources. They were able to see there are 1.3 million people roughly in the state of Maine and we get about thirty four million tourists coming through each year, down to the level of eight hundred thousand people go on Route 1 past the Boothbay Peninsula each summer.
We were trying to figure out how do we grow our shoulder season? How do we get more folks in? We get a little over a hundred thousand guests a year and the majority of those guests come in June, July and August. We were looking at how can we get more folks within that time period, but also grow where we are now.
By doing a partnership with George Sherwood, that’s an existing relationship we had had. We have this beautiful wind orchid in the gardens that spins. It’s a kinetic sculpture. George is out of Ipswich, Massachusetts, so it’s great for us to work with a New England artist who does fine work. We can’t afford, nor should we go after a [inaudible 54:02] exhibit. Other gardens do that, big locations. I think having someone like George Sherwood, whose work is gorgeous and it moves, is a beautiful draw to have at the gardens.
Speaking about Maine being just a small state, I’m always looking, whether it be online or magazines or book, and I stumbled across these rugs and I went those are the coolest things I’ve ever seen in my life. They’re like three-dimensional rugs based on the nature of Maine. I emailed, and sure enough Angela’s assistant wrote back and said we’d love to talk with you. It has gone into us working directly with Angela. Angela is one of the kindest souls you’ll ever meet and just a beautiful artist. She and her husband, Sherwood, do great work.
We’re actually going to have two rugs. One is a floral rug. The one carpet is inspired by … It’s sort of a montage of some of her existing work. That’s going to be primarily with flowers.
We’re off in the woodland. Angela’s drawn now to mosses and lichens and ferns. We’re going to do a living carpet on site. We’re going to go off and we’ve got areas where we can safely harvest some existing mosses and lichens and then Angela is going to come out and design on site. We’re going to do an installation right there on site this spring. We’ll document it and everything. That’s going to be huge and fun. We’re both really excited about that.
Then on top of that, starting this winter we’ll have our first holiday light show. Actually I was outside in the cold all day yesterday afternoon looking at trees and marking the trees and thinking how many lights will it take to go up this tree? What sort of display should we have floating in the water over here? We’re getting all that in, because believe it or not you need to get your orders in now for holiday lights before all the big box stores place their orders, so we’re doing that now. It will be all LED lights because we don’t have enough electricity and it’s better for the environment to use less electricity with LEDs and they last longer.
Lisa: I can tell you after having this conversation that I’m very eager to go back up and see what I’ve been missing in the last year since I haven’t been there.
Rodney: I’ll definitely give you a personal tour.
Lisa: That sounds great. I encourage people who are listening who are interested to learn more about the botanical gardens … Rodney, what is your website?
Rodney: It’s mainegardens, that’s plural, .org.
Lisa: Hopefully take that turnoff at the Boothbay Route 1 area.
Rodney: On Route 27.
Lisa: It’s very easy to kind of pass on by it, but you don’t want to do that. You want to actually go down towards Boothbay. Actually, you’re kind of in the woods a little ways. You have to be intentional about visiting.
Rodney: You do. You do. Don’t let Red’s Eats deter you from going over the Wiscasset Bridge. Come on down. We’d love to see everyone come this summer. We’re going to have extended hours a few nights this summer. The holiday light show will actually be a specially ticketed event during the nighttime.
Lisa: I will keep following your progress on Instagram, keep seeing what’s going on at Botanical Gardens. We’ve been speaking with Rodney Eason, who is the Director of Horticulture at the Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens. Thanks for driving down and being with us today.
Rodney: Thanks for having me. It’s my pleasure.
Lisa: You have been listening to Love Maine Radio, Show Number 191, Maine Lands. Our guests have included Chris Franklin and Rodney Eason. For more information on our guests and extended interviews, visit lovemaineradio.com. Love Main Radio is downloadable for free on iTunes.
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This is Dr. Lisa Belisle. I hope that you have enjoyed our Main Land show. Thank you for allowing me to be a part of your day and Happy Mother’s Day to all of the mothers who are listening. May you have a bountiful life.