Can't come here without thinking about our church friend Bob Ross, who was the administrator and head gardener of this property. He was regularly on Channel 8 as a gardening expert, and was invited to go to England on several occasions to share his horticultural expertise there.
He and his wife Polly were friends of ours for several years. They moved to Arizona and Polly has since passed on, but Bob's legacy lives on in our lives because of a lemon tree in the back yard of a previous home we owned. I told him that I wished we could grow a lemon tree just like another one we knew about in the neighborhood. Bob said No problem, just show me where it's at. So he and I walked up the driveway of that home where the tree was and snipped off part of one of the branches (we knew the homeowners and got permission beforehand). When we got it home Bob did something with some sphagnum and foil to graft it onto a lemon tree we already had in the back yard. After giving it time for the roots to grow into the sphagnum we planted it as a new tree and away we went...a genetically identical twin to the one we'd cut from before. Though we no longer live in that house, when we pass by and see it over the fence on our walking route I think of Bob.
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