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05/09/2018 08:30 AMGardening is in Sandy French’s genes. Her grandfather started a wholesale floral business in the mid-19th century in Fond-du-Lac, Wisconsin, that’s still run by her family.
Sandy remembers going to the warehouse and watching ladies pot plants as a child. She also remembers helping in her mother’s garden.
“She had wonderful perennials and a vegetable garden. She was a canner. People used to do a lot more of that in those days,” she recalls. “We, my sister and I, were always out in the yard.”
On Saturday, May 12, Sandy isn’t going to be in her yard in Essex, where she maintains extensive gardens of both flowers and vegetables; instead she is going to be at the town park on Main Street, encouraging shoppers to buy plants for their own gardens at the Essex Garden Club May Market. The market runs from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m.
Sandy will be working in the area devoted to annual plants and flowers, and she is going to look just as colorful as the blooms she is selling, in a black hat decorated with yellow flowers. It is a tradition for the garden club members working at the May Market to wear blossom-decorated headgear.
In addition to annuals, perennials are always big sellers at the market. Every member contributes 12 plants from his or her own garden for the perennial sale. Sandy is actually growing her contribution, liatris, sometimes known as gayfeather. She says the plants attract both bees and butterflies. She started the liatris in her greenhouse, but brought the plants in at night because the greenhouse got too cold.
She has also decorated gardening gloves for the gift shop, new this year. Each pair has a different raised design ranging from watermelons and ladybugs to strawberries. The raised effect is created by special paint Sandy used that puffs up as it dries. The gloves, she assures, are washable and with the designs remaining unharmed.
Sandy not only donates to the May Market; she is also a recipient. Every year her husband Bill, a retired attorney, has won a silent auction for delivery of a dozen roses once a month for a year.
Sandy and Bill moved here seven years ago from Dallas, Texas.
“We thought the neighbors would wonder if we wore cowboy boots,” she says.
The neighbors needn’t have worried. The Frenches both have Wisconsin roots. In fact, they have known each other, Sandy says, “forever.” They were best friends, not steady dates, in high school. But Sandy’s family moved to Florida and the pair lost contact.
“He tracked me down 15 years later,” she recalls.
They first lived in Wisconsin, and then for 13 years in Dallas. As Bill approached retirement, they realized they had a choice to make about where to settle.
“We knew Dallas was going to be a temporary home,” she recalls. “We’d had kids at school in Boston and we’d spent time in the Northeast, and we decided that’s where we’d like to retire.”
Now two of their grown daughters live in New York State and one in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
Sandy and Bill decided they would spend their first year organizing their house and gardens. They have created, with the help of bonsai expert Victor Eng, Japanese gardens with black and white stones, bonsai trees, and some fanciful designs of rocks arranged to form turtles and a rock-plant combination to simulate a hedgehog.
Bill built a miniature bridge that spans a section of the garden’s pebble river. He also built a much larger bridge for foot traffic that goes over a stone wall at Windswept Ridge, a property of the Essex Land Trust.
To the side of a greenhouse that the couple installed is a vegetable garden. Sandy says it will have all the makings of one of her favorite summer dishes, Serbian salad. The recipe, which Sandy says she got from a restaurant in Milwaukee, calls for chopped onions, peppers, and tomatoes from which the seeds have been removed, along with feta cheese and seasoning.
“It tastes absolutely wonderful with fresh tomatoes,” Sandy says.
Other areas of the garden have a variety of Sandy’s favorite flowers, among them lilies, along with such devices as a battery-driven mole repeller and Hav-a-Hart traps for rabbits. She baits the traps with what Bugs Bunny would advise, carrots, but so far she has had little luck trapping rabbits, despite the fact she knows they are around.
“I don’t think they like my carrots,” she says, a situation unheard of in a Bugs Bunny cartoon.
Despite Sandy’s years of experience in the garden, every year there are some plants that don’t do well.
“Nothing in a garden is guaranteed,” she points out.
When they came to Essex, Sandy created window boxes, which she now plants every year for their home, 22 of them in all.
“I’d always wanted window boxes, I just hadn’t thought about so many,” she says.
It takes her about a week to get all the plants in. The boxes have different combinations of flowers and greenery, depending on their orientation to the sun. Sandy has to water all of them every day in the summer, sometimes twice on days when the temperature soars into the 90s. For that reason, her creations never have one of the flowers most often associated with window boxes, geraniums.
“They don’t like water and they get wetter than they want to be,” she says.
In the winter, Susan likes to sew, often making jackets for herself.
“Bill teases me that I always end up with a jacket. He asks me if I need another one,” she says. “I think men just have different feelings about clothes.”
Sandy looks forward to the moment at 9 a.m. when Essex First Selectman Norman Needleman traditionally rings the bell to say the May Market is open.
“It’s a great time; it’s so well organized and it’s wonderful to be part of the group,” she says.
For non-gardeners at the market, Sandy suggests buying the secret recipe garlic salt that members of the Essex Garden Club prepare every year. For those who want a taste of gardening without too much work, she suggests the already-prepared garden baskets the club creates. They do need to be watered, but they minimize guilt if things go wrong.
“They die anyway at the end of the summer, so you don’t have to feel bad,” Sandy says.
When the May Market ends, Sandy says she always feel a combination of elation and exhaustion—but she doesn’t have too much time to be exhausted. She has to concentrate on something else: her own garden.
Essex Garden Club May Market
The Essex Garden Club hosts its annual May Market on Saturday, May 12 from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. at Essex Town Park, Main Street.