Dear Friends of North Hill,

The very sad events of the last 3 months have caused us to give great thought to the future of this garden. It is in some ways a Vermont, if not a New England, institution. Thousands have visited and we deeply wish that it can remain a source of beauty and inspiration for our so many friends. But clearly its role must alter. It must become a more public garden and one more dedicated to instruction and demonstration.  In this light, we have decided for the year 2011 to enlarge its purpose in the direction of education and simple community pleasure.

In the coming year, the garden will be open each Friday and Saturday afternoon from the end of April to the middle of October.  Two workshops, seminars or demonstrations will occur each month. Of course our two annual symposia will continue.  Guided tours will be available to garden clubs and horticultural societies.

This more public mission will rest entirely on the generosity and support of our many friends and visitors. We have therefore decided to establish a Friends of North Hill Society. Like all such organizations, there will be several levels of membership, some for those of you who are rich and many for those of you who are not.  You will all be welcome.

In this letter, we appeal for your support. A simple supporting membership will offer attendance at one symposium, access to the garden on all open days, attendance at one garden workshop, and a subscription to a quarterly North Hill newsletter. We would ask a contribution of $250.00 yearly.

On a more expansive level, we would offer sustaining memberships of two years duration which would include attendance at both symposia, all workshops, all open days, a subscription to a quarterly North Hill newsletter, and an annual Guy Wolff commemorative pot. We would ask a contribution of  $1500.00.

For any institution, founding members are crucially important. They obviously and of necessity provide the core capital that enables an institution to establish and sustain itself. And so to those of you fortunate enough to be able to consider contributions at this level, we offer the following, be it meager, benefits. Admission to everything all the time, a celebratory luncheon in the garden in the summer, on we hope a sunny day, a subscription to the newsletter, a beautiful Guy Wolff pot with a North Hill plant in it, and perhaps most specially, an etching by Bobbi Angell of Mannettia cordifolia, the most remarked on plant in the garden at North Hill in 2010. The cost of this subscription, which is a lifetime subscription, is $5000.00.

A response to this letter involves you obviously in a long if not lifetime commitment to a place and a garden.  We recognize that this is no small commitment to request.  We hope the pleasures you have found here will make it seem not unreasonable.

Please  mail your contributions to:

North Hill
PO Box 178
Readsboro, VT 05350

Wayne Winterrowd once told me, in an e-mail, that he thought of me when autumn brought pig-killing time around. I was grateful for the thought. And if I ever find myself covering rosebushes with evergreen boughs — while wearing crampons — I will certainly think of Wayne, who reported doing just that a couple of years ago. Like many gardeners around the world, I will be mourning Wayne for a good long time. He died on Sept. 17, age 68, at home in Vermont where he lived with his spouse and co-author, Joe Eck.

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It took us many years to understand the specific needs of nerines.  Thirty, to be precise, because it was that long ago that we acquired our first one from beside the garbage can of a friend in Marblehead, Massachusetts.  “They are one-shot deals,” he explained,  “Like paperwhites.  You can’t make them bloom again.”  But they seemed so promising, each one sitting on top of the soil and looking like a fat daffodil.  There wasn’t any foliage, but there was one wisened pink flower on a long stem that seemed to tug at us.  Anyway, bulbs always give you that feeling of potential life that makes them hard to throw away, even if they are only  sprouted onions in the crisper drawer.  The bulbs  were shoulder-to-shoulder,  not nicely spaced  like you’d plant a pot of tulips for forcing, but  joined at the base and pressing against the rim, like they had multiplied to that extent. And there was also the pot,  an old clay one,  white-crusted with lime.  In any case, at that time  we seemed to be running a  Shelter for Unloved Plants, rescuing half-frozen ficus  trees from city curbs and shrunken, dust-covered African violets from the rubbish room of our apartment building.   So we took these nerines.  At the least, the pot would be nice to have.

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On Monday, September 20th, author and gardener Wayne Winterrowd died at the age of 68, after a brief illness; he was at home, at his garden, North Hill, in Readsboro, Vermont. Wayne was surrounded by family, friends, and the warble of his beloved canaries. Wayne and his partner Joe Eck were the authors of some of my favorite garden books, including A Year at North Hill. I have never met either Wayne or Joe, but after I reviewed their last book, Our Life in Gardens, which I loved, I got an email from Wayne thanking me. Thus began our correspondence. His letters were wonderful: generous, funny, thoughtful, compassionate. For all of you who loved Wayne, I am excerpting some of them here. I have been rereading the letters as a way of honoring him. His voice, and his enormous spirit, will be deeply missed by those of us lucky enough to have had him in our lives. And of course, his work with Joe lives on, not only in their books, but in their beautiful garden, North Hill.

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Wayne Winterrowd, a gardening expert who wrote widely about the subject, designed gardens for others across the United States and spent more than 30 years building a seven-acre garden in southern Vermont that draws visitors from all over the world, died on Sept. 17 at his home in Readsboro, Vt. He was 68.

Wayne Winterrowd, left, and Joe Eck in their Vermont garden.

The cause was heart failure, said his spouse, Joe Eck.

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Wayne was half the soul of North Hill, that magical northern place of verdant gardens, music, farm animals, and good food, created, refined, and nurtured for several decades in partnership with Joe Eck. We, the public, were privy to their life there through their writings in a number of entrancing books, the most recent being Our Life in Gardens.

A few of us were even more fortunate. Wayne was an inveterate letter-writer, effortlessly filling pages in a manner more common in an earlier century. For a number of years, he and I carried on a conversation through e-mail, weekly, sometimes daily, about our separate lives, what filled our days, about our thoughts and feelings. In this way we became intimate with each other, more than our periodic visits could possibly afford.

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READSBORO — Wayne Winterrowd, whose more than 30-year-old Vermont garden became an international inspiration and demonstration of an original American gardening style, died Friday, at his home in southern Vermont after a brief illness. He was 68.

Winterrowd, along with Joe Eck, his partner in life, business and gardening, have been leaders in landscape design, eating and living seasonally, and fighting for gay rights, before these were household topics.

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