York Corner
In recent weeks, Independent reader Dorothy Healy e-mailed the paper with a suggestion that it take note of a field of flowers on Old Post Road - and her note eloquently gave reasons why, in terms we think worth passing along here.
"Each time I pass," Dorothy wrote, "the meadow is more beautiful - a sane alternative to a chemically treated lawn, for all of us to enjoy."
Other people, she suggested, might welcome answers to questions she has - "who owns the lawn, who created it and what it takes to keep it going" - and the person responsible, she added, deserves a pat on the back.
"Surely," Dorothy concluded, "congratulations are in order for sharing nature's beauty with all who go by and [providing] a living example of an ecological and magnificent alternative to a ‘green carpet' lawn needing constant attention, limitless watering and chemicals to keep it green."
Yowser! Our thoughts exactly!
And so, at the first chance we got, we high-tailed it over to Old Post Road, where we found the flowery field at the corner by Tenney Rose Lane.
We'd picked a Saturday (last Saturday, in fact), because we figured that's when folks would be likely to be home, and, sure enough, we found Cheryl ("Cheri" she told us she's called) Clark, puttering about in the tidily-kept and spotless little house on the hillside above the field, and as welcoming and willing to answer our questions as if we'd known each other forever and had long-planned an appointment.
She had the house built 12 years ago, Cheri said, on a ¾-acre lot, once part of her grandparents' property, that had grown up to bushes, trees and vines. About three years ago, she decided that she wanted to, as she put it, "do something with the landscaping," something that would be "easy," and something that would "not require mowing all the time."
Cheri has worked in the finance department at York Hospital for 32 years, she told us, and there she's long been friends with co-worker Diane Hale, who happens to be wife to John Hale, Jr., and mother to John Hale III and Steve Hale, all of whom constitute the York-based Hale's Landscaping, Inc.
So it was natural that, when it came time to making landscaping decisions, Cheri would turn to the Hales.
And what the Hales provided was hydro-seeding - spraying flower seeds in a slurry of water and mulch over the area below her house that constitutes something like a third of her property.
Since then, each spring, the field has grown in carpeted with multiple kinds of wildflowers. The first blooms come, Cheri said, about the second week in June - a noteworthy time for her since her birthday is on June 9 - and they continue well through July, reseeding themselves each year, but with differing results, so that, as Cheri put it, "Every year is a surprise. The fun part is not knowing what's going to come up every year."
The first year, for example, she reported, she had many sunflowers; then, last year for the first time, she had daisies, and, this year, more daisies than last.
Most rewardingly, this flowered field requires no maintenance other than one mowing after all has died in November.
"I'd recommend it to anybody who doesn't want to mow lawn," Cheri said.
In fact, she does have a little lawn, and thinks it's a good idea to retain at least some - and she confessed to us that the flowered-field installation process hadn't been all completely rosy.
The field's first summer in flowers, she explained, was a very dry one, requiring her to set up five hoses with sprinklers to assure the plants' survival. "It was horrible," she told us. "I thought: What did I get into?"
Now, however, all she has to contend with are images of people stopping to take pictures, or coming to the house requesting permission to take pictures, or, once in a while, people, without permission, picking flowers. Of that last occurrence she says, simply, "That doesn't make me too happy."
Last year at about this time she even had a visitor of some eminence: nationally-known musician and York resident Tim Janis came with a photographer to get a shot of the flowers to grace the cover of his CD, "Woven in Time."
"They probably took 100 photos," Cheri said, "then sat around my table and picked out one on the computer." A few months later, Cheri came home from work one day to find five copies of the new CD on her doorstep, images of her flowers on it, prominent in white and green, on front and back.
On the day we visited, Cheri could name only a few of all the blooms we could see, so we asked her for a sampling to take home and identify at leisure.
We ended up being stumped by a number of them, despite access to half a dozen or more flower guides, but the process was, as always, eye- and mind-expanding. We'd never noticed, for example, the indentation in the button-like center of the Ox-eyed Daisy, or felt the hairiness of the leaves of the Black-eyed Susan, and we discovered that each golden ray (they look like petals) of the eight-rayed daisy-like Lance-leaved Coreopsis is scalloped, and has just four lobes.
And, because one bit of learning leads to another in these rambling quests, we also learned that, etymologically, "Coreopsis" means "bug-like," a reference to the shape of the plant's fruit, and that the daisy is so called because, closing up each night, it's the "day's eye."
When we left Cheri on Saturday, we laughed because her father, who lives close by with her mother (they are Herb and Nancy Clark, and they live in one of the oldest houses along Old Post Road), was riding a sit-down mower, laboriously proceeding in long rows up and down to cut the grass on a big lawn across the way.
"Spread the word!" we said to Cheri.
And we say it here, too.
