Transcription of Maine Lands #191
Speaker 1: You’re listening to Love Maine Radio with Dr. Lisa Belisle, recorded in the studio of Maine Magazine at 75 Market Street, Portland, Maine. Dr. Lisa Belisle is a physician trained in family and preventative medicine, acupuncture and public health. She offers medical care and acupuncture at Brunswick Family Medicine. Read more about her integrative approach to wellness in Maine Magazine.
Love Maine Radio is available for download free on iTunes. See the Love Maine Radio Facebook page or www.lovemaineradio.com for details. Now here are a few highlights from this week’s program.
Speaker 2: We need to make sure that people are going to love these places and take care of them. That starts with our children and it starts with kids in schools, so we have very active education programs, really trying to make sure that we build an understanding of the natural world, and out of that we hope to come to a sense of appreciation for the natural world and out of that sort of comes a responsibility or an interest in helping care for the natural world.
Speaker 3: As a cultural attraction in Maine along with all the other cultural attractions, 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.”
Speaker 1: Love Maine Radio is made possible with the support of the following generous sponsors, Maine Magazine, Marcy Booth of Booth, Maine, Apothecary by Design; Mike LePage and Beth Franklin of REMAX Heritage, Harding Lee Smith of The Rooms, and Bangor Savings Bank.
Lisa: This is Dr. Lisa Belisle and you are listening to Love Maine Radio, Show Number 191, Maine Lands, airing for the first time on Sunday, May 10, 2015.
Whether we are traversing our native soil or sinking our fingers into it, we Mainers are in love with the land. Today we speak with Chris Franklin, Executive Director of the Cape Elizabeth Land Trust and Rodney Eason, Director of Horticulture at the Coastal Main Botanical Gardens. Each of these individuals brings a unique perspective on what the Earth has to offer and what we, in turn, have to offer the Earth. Thank you for joining us.
It’s my great pleasure to have in the studio today with me Chris Franklin. Chris Franklin has been the Executive Director of the Cape Elizabeth Land Trust since 2003. He oversees all aspects of the organization, including marketing development, land stewardship and land acquisition. He lives in Cumberland with his wife, Julie, and their three children. Thanks so much for coming in today.
Chris: Thanks. It’s good to be here.
Lisa: Land Trust, this is something that’s become increasingly important here in Maine. We have to obviously create access for people and maintain the lands that we so enjoy. Why did you get into doing this line of work?
Chris: I was a geography major and grew up fishing and hiking and doing those types of things and studying environmental conservation as a discipline in college and working in San Francisco. When I came back, the idea that we could do something locally that would have some lasting impression, think globally, act locally, at the time it was a great match. It’s really grown into something that’s just beyond my greatest dreams in terms of what we’ve been able to achieve, but also in terms of the meaning the word has for me.
Lisa: You originally were from Massachusetts?
Chris: Yep.
Lisa: Did you do a lot of this fishing and outdoor activities in Massachusetts?
Chris: It’s interesting. I grew up in Lincoln, Massachusetts, which is really at the forefront of local land conservation. Back in the sixties they were buying local land and developing portions of it, but making sure they saved the most important parts. Almost sixty percent of the town is conservation land. That was just the town I grew up in. I just took it for granted. I didn’t know anything different.
As I traveled more and as I got older, I really had developed a much stronger appreciation for what they had done. Now that I’ve learned how they did it, they were really ahead of their time.
Lisa: Why would you decided to be a geography major? What was it about that that somehow called you?
Chris: It’s really about the distribution of plants and people and cultures and different habitats. Really to me it’s one of the most intriguing fields in that why people live where they do, how they’ve evolved, how different species interact, so not only the geology, but the ecology and the biology. In all there was earth sciences, where they intersect with the human experience is geography.
Lisa: Somehow in your childhood you became interested enough in all of these disparate things that came into one science that you decided to pursue it as a major?
Chris: Yeah, something in the earth sciences. It wasn’t a big surprise to a lot people. In fact, when they had us program within the School of Geography, which was environmental conservation, when I realized that could be my major the light went on and things started to click and that’s when … It sort of set me on my path.
Lisa: After you graduated from college you actually went all the way across the country and then a little further. You went to San Francisco. You went to Alaska. Why did you do that?
Chris: My mom had a little saying taped to her fridge that said, “All you can give a child are roots and wings.” They really encouraged us to spread those wings and to travel as much as we could and to explore different places. I certainly hope my kids will do the same. Growing up in New England was great. Most of my friends stayed in New England. A lot of them are still there.
I’m back, but the chance to go somewhere else … I lived in Taos for a year. I lived in San Francisco for eight years, just meeting people with different life experience. That’s what college was about. I took that for another ten or fifteen years beyond that. That change, that getting out of our comfort zone really can teach you a lot and it’s good to bring those lessons home with you.
Lisa: Now you call Maine home?
Chris: Of course. Yeah.
Lisa: What was it that brought you back?
Chris: It’s partially the geography. It’s that sense of place. It’s something that’s familiar. Portland in particular … Living outside of Portland, we have the ocean, we have the north woods. I do canoe trips and a fair amount of fly fishing, but also to have a really dynamic small enough city that you don’t have to deal with parking or traffic. When we moved here, the parking garages were fifty cents an hour and that was a really nice change from San Francisco.
Lisa: I remember that. It seems like a while ago that that was the case, but you’re right. When you go to a big city parking is so much more expensive. It seems like Portland is a very livable place still.
Chris: I think that’s part of it being a healthy place to live, is that it really enables you to not have to deal with a lot of the hassles. When I go back around the areas where I grew up, the stress level seems higher.
Lisa: You had a one-year-old when you started this job and you now have an eight-year-old and …
Chris: Ten, and he’s just about to turn thirteen.
Lisa: You’re children have been evolving as your career has been evolving. How has that looked in your family life?
Chris: I think part of what we look at at the Land Trust is really not only that we’re in a really important time where we have to do the acquisition now, but we need to make sure that people are going to love these places and take care of them. That starts with our children and it starts with kids in schools, so we have very active education programs, really trying to make sure that we build an understanding of the natural world. Out of that we hope there comes a sense of appreciation for the natural world, and out of that comes a responsibility or an interest in helping care for the natural world.
For me, if I can’t do that at home, it’s difficult. They teach me a lot too. It’s really great to see things from their eyes, things that I’ve just given into that are just the way things are, that they really challenge. Why does global warming have to be something that we can’t just address full on and change our thinking about? For them it’s just ridiculous, and it is ridiculous, but we’re so in the midst of it that it’s hard for us to see.
Lisa: That’s a good point. I’m just thinking about my own children and the questions they raise about things that I sort of long ago stopped questioning because it just seemed that it is the way it is and we just need to accept it, but that really isn’t true. There are many things that can be changed. You just need to start examining them more closely and put some work behind it.
This is something that you have been doing with the Cape Elizabeth Land Trust really almost for twelve years. It must have been an interesting change over time?
Chris: When I came to the organization, a lot of the founders were still there, a lot of people who essentially ran it. It’s an all volunteer organization, so I became essentially the first full time paid Executive Director for the Trust.
There was a transition of those people feeling after a few years that the organization was in good hands and being able to step back a little bit. We got a fresh new slate of board members and we’re now getting to the point where after nine years they need to at least take one year off the board before coming back.
We’re sort of going through another change. I think, as hard as it is to lose those people who bring so much time and talent to the organization … To keep it fresh, to keep it nimble, I think you need to bring in new people, but it’s really hard, because that’s the life blood of the organization.
We’re a staff of two and there’s no way we could do a fraction of the work that gets done if it weren’t for our volunteers and our board members. It’s a really phenomenal partnership. I think a lot of Maine is greatly, greatly impacted by it’s nonprofits and it’s really important to understand the cumulative impact of that and not just the impact on the individual organizations.
If you look at land trusts throughout the state that really started to do local land preservation, now thirty years later these organizations are the largest source of new conservation lands in the state. In fact, they are doing the vast majority of land protection in the state. Even though they were formed just to do their own little local bit, the cumulative impact is over a million acres of conservation land in Maine.
Lisa: It does seem that this has been a touchy subject, especially shoreline frontage and access to things like beaches. I think it may be more so in other parts of the country though. It seems as though in Maine in general we still have access to places that many other locals don’t.
Chris: Yeah. Part of the reason that per capita New England has a lot more land trusts than most of the rest of the country is that being settled under colonial law came with it a lot of rights of access. In New England in particular, you’re allowed to walk on somebody’s property unless they post it against trespassing. That’s just been the rule of the road or the culture. If you go out west, if you go to a lot of places, it’s exactly the opposite. You’re not allowed on the property unless you’re explicitly given access, unless you get to somewhere like Hawaii, where the entire oceanfront is considered a public domain.
That tradition of private ownership is both good and bad in terms of our access to resources. States like Nevada, eighty percent of the land is public land. It’s federally owned or state owned. In states like Maine and Vermont and New Hampshire it may be in the teens. We really rely upon private land owners for access a lot more, even though ponds greater than ten acres, the waterways and the oceanfront are given limited public rights of access. We do rely on private land owners a lot more than most areas, and that’s why the Land Trust has been such a great model here.
Lisa: It seems as though there has to be a respect on the part of the people who use the land. I’ve walked on a lot of the coast and actually in from the coast and the woodlands and around people’s properties and you could see how easily it could become abused. If somebody were to litter or somebody were to be loud or somebody were to be obnoxious, maybe overuse by bikes or even just people walking too much on plant roots … It seems to me there has to be a mutual respect that takes place?
Chris: Absolutely. That idea that not taking it for granted regardless of who owns it, even if it’s a State Park, but especially if it’s a privately owned parcel where that land owner is encouraging or just allowing access to your property, and they may have very simple rules, no fires, no motorized vehicles or something. When people ignore those, they’re jeopardizing access.
It’s a challenge, but I think it’s akin to a lot of other aspects of our life. You can park and take up two spots. You can do all sorts of things that are going to make people upset, and if you do them enough there’s going to be some repercussion.
Speaker 1: Love Main Radio was brought to you by Bangor Savings Bank. For over a hundred and fifty years Bangor Savings has believed in the innate ability of the people of Maine to achieve their goals and dreams. Whether it’s personal finance, business banking or wealth management assistance you’re looking for, at Bangor Savings Bank you matter more. For more information, visit www.bangor.com.
Lisa: One of the pieces that I like to write for Old Port is called On Foot. We explore different areas on foot. That’s why it’s called that obviously. One of the earliest pieces we did was actually a walk in Cape Elizabeth that walked near Crescent Beach and near the Sprague property and then back again. What was interesting about that is you got woods, you got wetlands, sort of fields, you got forests, and it was collaboration. A lot of people made that path possible. You have other paths that are collaborative. Can you tell me about some of your favorites?
Chris: I’ve been doing for a number of years now this crosstown walk that goes from the Portland Head Lighthouse to Crescent Beach. It’s a seven and a half mile walk across town. It’s really interesting. It’s origins were back in the seventies before there was any local conservation land. They had this idea of a trail connecting the two.
Now that it’s come to fruition, it is this mix of land that was federally owned, bought by the town, land the town got from subdivisions, lands that the Land Trust worked with owners to put conservation easements on, lands that the Land Trust purchased, just really all the different ways that you can do the land preservation I represented there, as are all the different habitats. You have tidal saltwater marsh. You have old growth forest. You have open fields. You have aspen and birch and spruce and fir. You really have all the different types, as well as starting in the bay and ending on the ocean.
It’s amazing that in a town like Cape Elizabeth, nine thousand acres, fifteen square miles, that there’s still such a diversity of habitat and places to go.
Lisa: The crosstown walk starts at the lighthouse?
Chris: Yep.
Lisa: It ends on?
Chris: At Kettle Cove.
Lisa: At Kettle Cove? People could park at one end and then … If you were going to do that whole walk, if it’s seven miles … Is it seven miles total or is it …
Chris: Yeah. What we do, I lead a trip twice a year through Cape Elizabeth Community Services. You don’t have to be a resident to do it. We meet at the lighthouse at 8:00. We stop at our office, which is halfway, around 10:30. We’re to Kettle Cove by noon. We set up a big lunch. We feed you and shuttle you back to the Fort by 1:00, so it’s really a half-day thing.
Lisa: People who don’t want to do a full fifteen miles out and back, they can …
Chris: Nobody does that. No.
Lisa: They can do that crosstown piece? That makes sense. What other areas do people enjoy in Cape Elizabeth?
Chris: I think Great Pond is one of those places that I love to go just because in all different seasons it changes every day. It has active beaver dams. It’s a spring fed, four foot deep, a hundred and twenty-five acre pond. It freezes up quickly in the winter, so you get some great skating there in the winter. Cross-country skiing, people go ice fishing. The town built a canoe rack there and you can get your canoe in there pretty quickly.
To have something that remote, because there aren’t any houses along the shore, it’s somehow remained an isolated pond. It’s just one of these hidden places. That’s great. Robinson Woods, the two properties we own over there, are just phenomenal. Almost sixty of the eighty acres are considered primary forest. Robinson Woods was one of the first ones we bought.
For a town that was nearly clear cut a hundred years ago when it was all agricultural, the idea that you still have some two hundred and three hundred year old trees that close to Portland in family that owned a paper company is pretty amazing. It’s just one of those places where everything else goes away when you’re there.
Lisa: How long are the walks if one were to go to Great Pond or to go to Robinson Woods?
Chris: Great Pond is probably a mile from end-to-end and it’s sort of an A-to-B kind of walk. It’s not a loop, so you can go as far as you want and turn around. Robinson Woods has about a mile and a quarter outer loop trail and Robinson Woods too has another mile to mile and a half trail that cuts from the Shore Road all the way over to Route 77 near the center of town, but there are some smaller loops you can do in there. If you wanted to do a two-hour walk, there’s plenty of stuff there for you.
Lisa: If you’re going to Robinson Woods, you could park near Shore Road it sounds like?
Chris: Yep.
Lisa: If you’re going to Great Pond, where would you park then?
Chris: Fenway Road just off Fowler, or down at the Kettle Cove Dairy, which is a little challenging in the summer because it’s popular. You can get on our website and look at the maps. The town has some maps and it’s pretty easy to get to.
Lisa: Towns like you are actively doing educational events for people, at least this walk that you described earlier?
Chris: Yeah. We have a fourth grade program in the schools for kids, but we also have adult programs. We did [inaudible 20:40], we do spring wildflower walks, vernal pool walks, winter shore birds, migrating birds. We probably do twenty or so programs a year.
The school ones are great, just because the fourth graders … We’ve been doing that for probably ten years and the fourth graders are learning about the water cycle and the nutrient cycle and animal adaptation and camouflage and all that great stuff in classrooms so we said we got this property just down the road that they go out and they can see all that.
They do two hours in the fall, an hour in the winter, and two hours again in the spring so that they can see those cycles happening. We give them a journal and they can keep their notes and do their drawings. It’s just been great for the kids because they just really light up when they’re out there and see how things work.
Lisa: Obviously this type of access to land requires some funding. You’ve raised more than five million dollars, I believe, to support local land conservation. That’s an interesting aspect of your job. I wonder if you knew that this was something that you were going to be so actively involved in when you were going through as a geography major?
Chris: I think so. I think any nonprofit needs to have a supportive community and that comes in many ways. I think you could argue that the cost of what we’re doing would be two or three times what it’s been if we didn’t have so much volunteer, if we needed to staff every position to do all the work that we do, and we’re fortunate in not having to do that.
We get support in so many different ways. We get sponsorship for our events. We get foundation grants for our acquisitions. We have family foundations and individuals who donate to us. We have currently about fifty families who are part of our Conservation Leadership Circle who are donating a thousand dollars or more to the organization in a given year. Those big numbers really come when we do the land acquisitions. We’ve had some fairly substantial properties donated to us or sold to us, what they call a bargain sale, below their market value.
People are able to give in a lot of different ways. Some people have time. Some people have money. Some people have property. Some people have expertise in services. You really need to cobble together everything you need from where you can get it. Even though that’s a big number, we’re a pretty lean organization in terms of how we operate. There is no more important time to be doing this land conservation.
When we were formed in 1985, there were no local conservation lands in Cape Elizabeth, and that was fairly common throughout the state. I would argue that it’s going to be a fifty-year window where in 2035 or so it’s going to be hard for us to really have priority lands out there that we’re still casing just because we’re such a small town. If we’re in the midst of this fifty-year window and the town is about to celebrate its two hundred and fiftieth anniversary, throw on another two hundred and fifty years and we have a five hundred year span of the town’s history. There’s going to be a fifty-year window right in the middle where all the local land conservation happened, and we’re right in the midst of that.
That’s a really exciting time. I think that helps us in terms of giving people the urgency and the importance of what we’re doing now because we’re not going to have these chances in the future and people are going to be really, really glad we did this work.
Lisa: You have a big fundraiser in the summer that involves art?
Chris: Yes.
Lisa: Can you tell me about that?
Chris: This came very organically. Somebody walked in our door … Maryann Kaye walked in our door, who’s a great pastel artist, and wanted to see if we were interested in doing one of these events. We partnered with Rodney [Viosine 24:47], who’s a local resident. He hosted us for the first two years at his house and we got mostly local painters. I think we had seventeen painters the first year that we did this. We auctioned them off to support the Land Trust.
We were very careful from the beginning to give at least fifty percent of the sale price to the artists, and they are obviously welcome to donate more if they want to. I think this is our eighth year coming up. We have close to seventy applicants for thirty positions. The average sale price at the auction last year was above two thousand dollars. We had our first painting sell for more than five thousand dollars.
The caliber of the artists, I think just by reputation become one of the better [inaudible 25:33] auctions in the state, and we couldn’t be happier just because we have a great committee that works on it and a lot of artists who really like it and have been supportive of the event. It’s a real win-win because when you do special events they’re very time intensive, but to do an event like this that really does tie into our mission in terms of celebrating those natural places and seeing these incredible artists interpret the landscapes that we walk around in every day, it’s wonderful.
It’s really great to see that and it’s good for us in terms of exposing people to our mission and getting support for our mission, so it’s just been a great event.
Lisa: I know that Maine Magazine, Maine Home Design, we’ve been supports of the art auction for quite a while. Personally in my household, I actually have some of the art on our walls. One of them that is a special favorite was done by an artist of the Shore Road Path, which is a place that I have run often. Really it has a very special meaning for me.
I agree with you that to have things interpreted by artists and then to be able to bring that home and put it on your wall is special.
Chris: I want to do a collection of just the Portland Head Light. Every year we have one or two artists paint there and they are from the drippy oils where it looks like it’s melting into the ocean to hyper-realism. We’ve really run the gamut, and it’s neat to be able to facilitate that.
Lisa: Chris, what’s the date this year for your art auction?
Chris: July 12th.
Lisa: Okay. July 12th is the date for the art auction. How do people find out about the Cape Elizabeth Land Trust?
Chris: Capelandtrust.org is probably the best. That has our maps. It has our events you can sign up for. An electronic newsletter that comes once a month lets you know what upcoming walks and talks are, little stories from the field. We’re having another photo contest this summer. Every couple years we do a photo contest. It’s amazing as well just to see how many talented photographers there are.
Lisa: It’s been a great pleasure to speak with you. We’ve been talking with Chris Franklin, who is the Executive Director of the Cape Elizabeth Land Trust. I’m hoping to make it to the art auction again this year. I will definitely make it out to some of these trails that I have not yet walked or run on. Thank you for the work that you do and for being here.
Chris: Thanks. It’s been great being here.
Lisa: As a physician and a small business owner, I relay on Marci Booth from Booth Maine to help me with my own business and help me live my own life fully. Here are a few thoughts from Marci.
Marci: When was the last time you took a break from what you were doing? From the work that was piled up on your desk and just looked up? I know that during the course of my days I often forget to take a moment or two to just breathe, look up at the sky and dream. Terrible that I have to remind myself to breathe, but when I do I feel energized because in those moments I’m able to let go of the daily grind and think more about what I want to accomplish, how I want my business to grow. Sometimes those are the ah-ha moments.
If we all took a few moments out each day to stop what we’re doing and dream a little about our business futures, not only would we feel a great sense of calm, but we may come to realize that these dreams can, in fact, come true. I’m Marci Booth. Let’s talk about the changes you need, boothmaine.com.
Speaker 1: This segment of Love Maine Radio is brought to you by the following generous sponsors. Mike LePage and Beth Franklin of REMAX Heritage in Yarmouth, Maine. Honesty and integrity can take you home. With REMAX Heritage it’s your move. Learn more at rheritage.com.
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.
Speaker 1: There was a time when the apothecary was the place where you could get safe, reliable medicines carefully prepared by experienced professionals, coupled with care and attention, focused on you and your unique health concerns. Apothecary by Design is built around the forgotten notion that you don’t just need your prescriptions filled, you need attention, advice and individual care. Visit their website apothecarybydesign.com, or drop by the store at 84 Marginal Way in Portland and experience pharmacy care the way it was meant to be.
Experience chef and owner Harding Lee Smith’s newest hit restaurant, Boone’s Fish House and Oyster Room, Main seafood at it’s finest. Joining sister restaurants, The Front Room, the Grill Room, and The Corner Room, this newly renovated two-story restaurant at 86 Commercial Street on Customhouse Wharf overlooks scenic Portland Harbor. Watch lobstermen bring in the daily catch as you enjoy baked stuffed lobster, raw bar, and wood fired flatbreads. For more information, visit www.theroomsportland.com.
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.
For a preview of each week’s show sign up for our enewsletter and like our Love Maine Radio Facebook page. Follow me on Twitter and see my running, travel, food and wellness photos as bountiful1 on Instagram.
We’d love to hear from you so please let us know what you think of Love Maine Radio. We welcome your suggestions for future shows. Also, let our sponsors know that you have heard about them here. We are privileged that they enable us to bring Love Maine Radio to you each week.
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.
Speaker 1: Love Maine Radio is made possible with the support of the following generous sponsors, Maine Magazine, Marci Booth of Booth Maine, Apothecary by Design, Mike LePage and Beth Franklin of REMAX Heritage, Harding Lee Smith of The Rooms, and Bangor Savings Bank.
Love Maine Radio is recorded in the studio of Maine Magazine at 75 Market Street, Portland, Maine. Our Executive Producers are Susan [Grissanti 59:21], Kevin Thomas and Dr. Lisa Belisle. Audio production and original music by John C. McCain. Our Content Producer is Kelly Clinton. Our Online Producer is Andrew Cantillo.
Love Maine Radio is available for download free on iTunes, see www.lovemaineradio.com or the Love Maine Radio Facebook page for details.