Category: Feature

How a unique hobby helped restore a historic course

By Bill Case

In 2009, Bob Dedman Jr. and Don Padgett II, the gentlemen in charge at the Pinehurst resort, decided to dramatically overhaul Pinehurst course No. 2, one of America’s foremost championship golf venues. They sensed that the layout, built by Donald Ross in 1907 and periodically tweaked thereafter by the legendary architect until his death in 1948, had lost some of its character.

Starting around the early 1970s, Pinehurst had adopted the popular course maintenance formula of the era: lush green grass throughout the course, not just in the fairways. The native pine barren wire grasses and awkward sandy lies that confronted off-target golfers on No. 2 during Ross’ heyday largely disappeared. In their place came acres of 3-inch-deep irrigated grass. Too often, extrication from this cabbage could only be accomplished by hacking a wedge back to the fairway.

To restore No. 2 in a manner that approximated how Ross had presented the course, Dedman and Padgett called upon esteemed course designers Bill Coore and two-time Masters champion Ben Crenshaw. The Coore & Crenshaw website describes its design philosophy as a blending of Bill’s and Ben’s “personal experience and admiration for the classical courses of Ross, MacKenzie, Macdonald, Maxwell, and Tillinghast to create a style uniquely their own.”

The architects have a special connection to Pinehurst. Having already won in his professional debut, a 21-year-old Crenshaw nearly captured his second event as a pro, too, finishing second in the 1973 World Open, three strokes behind Miller Barber. The 144-hole marathon on No. 2 “stimulated my love for Pinehurst,” says Crenshaw. Coore, who grew up in Davidson County, North Carolina, was good enough to make Wake Forest University’s golf team and played No. 2 frequently in the 1960s, usually on $5 all-day passes. “There is no doubt,” he says, “that playing No. 2 gave me an appreciation of traditional, strategic golf courses that eventually pointed me in the direction of course architecture.”

While Coore & Crenshaw’s selection was applauded in golf circles, more than a few aficionados wondered about the potential impact of a drastic change. Why make major modifications to a course that only recently had held one of golf’s most dramatic major championships, the 1999 U.S. Open? What was the benefit of eliminating rough in favor of native waste areas? Didn’t the United States Golf Association prefer deep rough and narrow fairways? Could changing the character of No. 2 jeopardize its status as a championship venue?

Though they didn’t say so publicly at the time, Coore and Crenshaw also harbored misgivings. Coore knew that No. 2’s fairways had once stretched to nearly 50 yards in width. Now they averaged just 24 yards across. If the more generous dimensions were restored, would the USGA find fault or, worse yet, require the fairways be narrowed again for the 2014 men’s and women’s U.S. Opens?

The two architects had no interest in undertaking No. 2’s restoration if it might do more harm than good. Mike Davis, who had been in charge of setting up U.S. Open courses for years and who would become executive director of the USGA in 2011, promised that modifications resulting from the restoration would not be undone by the USGA. Indeed, Davis himself had broached the concept of restoring No. 2 in discussions with Dedman and Padgett.

But there remained a gnawing concern for Coore and Crenshaw — they wanted to know the precise details, dimensions and appearance of the course during the Ross era.

Bob Farren, the man in charge of maintaining the resort’s courses, provided an invaluable first clue. He advised that during the 1980s, his crew had uncovered the entirety of the abandoned fairway irrigation line that Ross had installed in 1932. Farren flagged the path of the defunct line for the architects. Its location confirmed that No. 2’s fairways had previously been configured in a more serpentine fashion. Due to mowing patterns, the fairways gradually became straighter in the 80 years following Ross’ placement of the irrigation line. Farren’s discovery enabled the architects to replot the location and dimensions of No. 2’s fairways to match the old Ross footprint.

But puzzles remained. What did the old native areas look like? Had the location and shape of greens, tees and bunkers changed any over the years? How did Ross sculpt the bunkers? To find answers, Coore and Crenshaw paid a visit to Pinehurst’s Tufts Archives and combed its remarkable collection of historic photos. Their research proved useful in providing an overview of the course’s general appearance, but photos illustrating hole-by-hole details were few. And those that did exist were snapped at ground level. Bill and Ben had hoped to find aerial photos that might provide a clearer, to scale, perspective of No. 2’s architectural details.

Though intimately familiar with Ross’ design style, absent more detailed photos, they were going to have to engage in a significant amount of guesswork. How could they be sure they were accurately restoring the course to the way Ross had left it or, at least, how he would be inclined to draw it up today? “Lord knows,” reflected Coore later, “we didn’t want to be known as the people who messed up No. 2.”

Unbeknownst to the architects, help would soon be coming their way, in the form of Craig Disher, a 65-year-old Washington, D.C., resident who was a decade into retirement after a 31-year career with the National Security Agency. Disher was an enthusiastic golfer, typically scoring in the low 80s at Manor Country Club in nearby Rockville, Maryland. His zest for the game ultimately steered him toward an avocation of his own creation.

It happened in 2004 after Disher read Lost Links, by Daniel Wexler. According to the book, various federal agencies had photographed vast portions of America from the air, and the millions of aerial images housed at Washington’s National Archives and Records Administration included many of golf courses. The United States Geological Service, the most prolific shutterbug among the agencies, had begun the process of photographing the country in the 1930s. There were various reasons for the program, one of which was inventorying America’s arable land. Even though crops aren’t customarily grown on recreational properties like golf courses, the USGS shot them anyway in the event the land might have to be used for food production or other necessities. This had actually taken place during World War II when “Victory Gardens” were patriotically planted on the nation’s courses, and cows grazed on the formerly pristine fairways of Augusta National Golf Club.

Disher thought it would make for an enjoyable project to search for aerial pics of his home course, Manor CC, designed in 1922 by noted golf architect William Flynn. Besides, the place where the USGS images were stored, NARA, was just a 15-minute drive from Disher’s home. After being directed to the cartography and map research room on the third floor, he got a crash course on the ins and outs of researching and retrieving aerial images from NARA’s vast catalog.

Finding images taken in the USGS project wasn’t a particularly difficult task. Rolls of large 9×9 negatives kept in stored cans were indexed by state, county and date. After identifying the rolls pertaining to a particular county, a researcher would request them, then generally wait a day or two before they were made available. Once the rolls were in hand, the researcher could sift through them on a light table, hunting for particular negatives.

The project was right up Disher’s alley. He enjoyed research and the patience, concentration, and persistence it required. A history major at Gettysburg College, his senior thesis (the evolution of Mao Zedong’s communist philosophy and politics) had necessitated innumerable hours wading through hundreds of magazines, newspapers and other documents at the Library of Congress.

“Organizing and cross-referencing them in the era before computers was great training,” Disher says. “My research at NARA mirrored that experience.”

His resourcefulness was augmented by life experiences. After college, during a stint in the U. S. Army, Disher received training in military interrogation at intelligence school and served as an interrogator during the Vietnam War. A significant portion of his employment at NSA had involved the deciphering of encrypted messages. As Disher puts it, that work, in contrast to library research, “primarily takes place in one’s head.”

From NARA’s index, Disher found that rolls of negatives taken in Montgomery County, Maryland (Manor CC’s location), were available. He found aerial images of Manor taken during the years 1940, 1948 and 1951. He photographed the negatives, then used Photoshop on a computer at home. This resulted in sharp black-and-white photographs that depicted the Manor course in riveting detail.

Delighted with the success of his search, Disher soon became a regular at the cartography and map research room, looking for and collecting aerial images of other golf courses in the Washington, D.C., area. It wasn’t long before his quest extended to courses that interested him around the United States. His most frustrating search involved the Lido Golf Club on Long Island, closed permanently due to wartime needs in 1942. Classic golf architecture devotees reverentially extoll this mystical links, ranking it among the finest ever built in the country. Locating aerial photos of Lido became something of a white whale for Disher, especially after he discovered USGS had not taken any photos in the area.

Undeterred, Disher considered whether the Department of Defense might have photographed Lido. Before and during World War II, DOD had arranged for military installations and areas of strategic importance to be photographed from the air. NARA had materials relating to these aerial flights, but researching them could be vexing due to a lack of indexing. However, NARA did hold records showing the flight patterns of planes that had flown on aerial photography assignments. The paths were depicted by the drawing of black lines of the planes’ tracks on acetate sheets. By superimposing those sheets over a geological map, a researcher could determine the general area where photography had taken place.

The information on the acetate sheets had been converted to microfilm. To search for Lido, Disher “had to look at all the microfilm rolls showing tracks of aerial photography planes in Long Island prior to 1942. Each roll of microfilm had to be viewed from start to finish, stopping at each track image to see if it passed over the area of interest.” Once those track images and the associated roll of negatives were identified, Disher would order the can containing them. The wait for the cans took additional time, since DOD images were in cold storage outside of D.C.

“It took me a month, but I finally found an undiscovered 1940 aerial photo of Lido,” he says. Disher shared the image with golf historians, and the highly detailed photograph subsequently appeared in several golf magazine articles, spurring an ongoing movement to someday recreate Lido’s majestic course.

Slowly, people in golf became aware of Disher’s research. Given the architectural trend of restoring classic courses to their original design, old photos — especially aerials — were in high demand. Without any thought of benefitting financially from his unique hobby, Disher cheerfully shared access to his collection gratis with grateful golf clubs and course architects who asked for his help. Disher furnished them 16×20 prints of aerial photos that were used in field work. Later the same prints often found their way to clubhouse walls.

In 2005, the avid golfer and his wife, Susan, acquired a vacation home in Pinehurst. This development, naturally, caused Disher to scope the USGS collection at NARA for images of No. 2. When he got wind of the fact that the Pinehurst resort intended to restore No. 2 to its original Donald Ross design, he thought the USGS photos might be of value to the architects. When he retrieved the images, Craig  found to his frustration they lacked sufficient detail to be of much use. He wondered whether there was a possibility DOD might have also photographed the course. Pinehurst was only 26 miles from Fort Bragg, a base Disher knew well. During his ’60s hitch in the Army, his basic training had been at Bragg. Disher knew area flights involving aerial military photography likely would have departed from nearby Pope Air Force Base. He knew Pope, too. In 1968, he was deployed from there to Vietnam, where he had joined a brigade of the 82nd Airborne Division.

Still, it was a long shot. Even if an aircraft had veered that far west, would the camera have been turned on and clicking after leaving the airspace over the base? Disher found and reviewed the track of a Christmas Day 1943 DOD flight of a plane photographing Fort Bragg. The track showed the plane had, indeed, traveled west toward Pinehurst, reaching the edge of the town before backtracking to Pope. Having identified the flight he was looking for, Disher asked to see the roll that would include the negatives. It would take a week before the roll arrived at NARA. Anxiously, Disher awaited the delivery of the Christmas Day flight photos.

When he finally flashed through the roll, Disher found the images of No. 2. He eyed what were, perhaps, the clearest aerial photos of a golf course he had yet encountered. While aloft over No. 2, the plane had flown lower than was customary. Who knows, maybe the pilot played golf and wanted to take an up-close look at the famous course. Regardless, the details shown of the bunker contouring, tee and green shapes, trees and native areas were strikingly vivid. The aerial camera, clicking away every few seconds, had also captured excellent images of the Pine Needles and Southern Pines courses.

Through a mutual friend, Disher contacted Coore and informed the architect of his find. Arrangements were made for Coore and Crenshaw to stop by Disher’s home in Pinehurst to inspect the photos from the 1943 flight that encompassed the entirety of No. 2. Disher arranged them on his dining room table to appear as a single photograph.

The architects were astonished at what they saw. The photos depicted exactly what they needed to assure themselves they were on the right track. As Crenshaw put it, “it was the confirmation we had been looking for.”

With Disher’s photos serving as their guide, Coore and Crenshaw completed No. 2’s restoration in March 2011. Gone was the matted rough. In its place were the native areas that had characterized Ross’ course. Indigenous plants such as red sorrel, spiderwort and spotted beebalm now grew haphazardly off the fairways. Bunkers were reshaped with the scruffier edges that had marked their appearance in the 1943 aerials. Some bunkers were eliminated, others restored. Several tees were moved to restore the driving challenges Ross had envisioned. Based on the 1943 photograph, the 15th green was widened to its right side by one-third. With areas off the fairway no longer watered, the course looked browner and more natural. Seven hundred of No. 2’s 1,100 sprinkler heads were eliminated, trimming water use in half. Fairways were widened and shaped to approximate their dimensions during the Ross era, thus allowing for alternative routes for approaches into greens.

The restoration was universally praised in golf circles, and the 2014 U.S. men’s and women’s Opens proved to be memorable successes. Fears that the changes to course No. 2 would render it too easy proved overblown. Only three men, including winner Martin Kaymer, and one woman, Michelle Wie, broke par.

“Craig was so instrumental in our work at No. 2,” says Coore of Disher. “I’m not sure we could have accomplished what we did without him.”

Disher became the go-to source for aerial photos of historic courses and has been called upon by architects like Ron Forse, Gil Hanse, Kyle Franz, Jim Urbina and Davis Love Jr. Now 76, Disher is gratified that what began as a pleasant diversion ended up contributing so much to golf. “My research introduced me to some of the nicest people I’ve ever met and taken me to golf courses I never dreamed I would see,” he says. “If you are searching for something you think can’t be found, it probably can be.”  PS

Pinehurst resident Bill Case is PineStraw’s history man. He can be reached at Bill.Case@thompsonhine.com.

A new exhibit welcomes a modernist master

By Jim Moriarty

Beginning on the 10th of September the Reynolda House Museum of American Art will be throwing a welcoming party for a particularly interesting work by Georgia O’Keeffe, the renowned 20th century American modernist. The celebration, housed in two rooms, continues until March 6. As if to make the iconic painter of flowers and skulls feel at home in her new home, she’ll be accompanied by old friends, the artists she appeared alongside in famed photographer Alfred Stieglitz’s series of Manhattan galleries — 291, An Intimate Gallery and An American Place — and the ones she chose to surround herself with during the rest of her life in an exhibition titled “The O’Keeffe Circle: Artist as Gallerist and Collector.”

“We wanted to welcome the painting to Reynolda with a splash,” says Phil Archer, the museum’s deputy director.

The work, a promised gift from Barbara Babcock Millhouse, the founding president of the museum and its primary donor, is Cedar Tree with Lavender Hills, one of O’Keeffe’s works depicting her beloved New Mexico landscape, first exhibited at An American Place in 1937 and purchased by Millhouse 40 years later. “I have O’Keeffe’s letter to her husband, Alfred Stieglitz, about doing that painting,” says Archer. “She says, ‘I can set it by the window and when I look at the painting and I look out the window, I have actually captured the way my world looks.’”

The painting will appear alongside another O’Keeffe work already in the museum’s collection, Pond in the Woods, Lake George. “It’s great for Reynolda because we’ll now have a painting from each of O’Keeffe’s main loci of inspiration,” says Archer.

Joining O’Keeffe will be a brace of her contemporaries, including John Marin, Arthur Dove, Alfred Maurer, Marsden Hartley, Max Weber, Abraham Walkowitz and Charles Demuth, a flock of artists more often described as the Stieglitz Circle but who are recognized here for their effect on, friendships with and passion for O’Keeffe. “Stieglitz was always declaiming who was the next artist and why people should appreciate them,” says Archer. “The exhibit is kind of a pocket-sized pantheon of the great, early moderns. They’ve all drunk from the well of French modernism. They’ve all read Kandinsky about the spiritual potential of art and abstraction. There’s this kind of reckoning. What will Americans make of the new artistic world in the teens and twenties? That’s what Stieglitz was calling for — what will modernism mean for us?” And, in Stieglitz’s mind, the abstract movement went hand-in-glove with the elevation of photography as an art form all its own.

Demuth was not originally in the Stieglitz stable, but in 1921, when he became “one of us,” as O’Keeffe described him, she enjoyed his company immensely. A friend of the poet William Carlos Williams, he was elegant and urbane, a gay artist with a lively sense of humor but frail health. Though he turned to oils later in his life, he was best known as a lively watercolorist. As a mark of his friendship with O’Keeffe, when he passed away in 1935, he left all his oil paintings to her.

Marin was introduced to Stieglitz by his friend and fellow photographer Edward Steichen and became enough of a commercial success to buy his own small island in Maine, where he lived during the summer. O’Keeffe admired his work, including a blue crayon abstract drawing. In Georgia O’Keeffe: A Life, Roxana Robinson writes, “Its intimate scale and its clear aesthetic independence made it suddenly accessible to O’Keeffe: conceptually, this was very close to her own work. It occurred to her that if Marin could make a living selling this eccentric expression of a private aesthetic vision, then she might be able to do the same.” He was close enough to both Stieglitz and O’Keeffe to be a witness at their 1924 wedding.

O’Keeffe’s first exposure to Dove at 291 was his painting Leaf Forms. After returning from Europe in 1909, Dove spent weeks camping alone in the woods. His abstract paintings “found a strong echo in Georgia’s developing aesthetic philosophy,” writes Robinson. “Dove’s work validated her own inclinations . . . she sensed the deep affinity between them.”

Dove was equally enamored. “That girl is doing without effort what all we moderns have been trying to do,” he said to the poet Jean Toomer.

Walkowitz worked so closely with Stieglitz at 291 that in 1912 and again in 1914 Stieglitz exhibited the work of the children Walkowitz was teaching in a Lower East Side settlement house. In this exhibit, Walkowitz is represented by one of his 5000-plus drawings of Isadora Duncan. “She had no laws. She did not dance according to the rules. She created,” Walkowitz said — words that he could have applied to O’Keeffe just as readily.

Paintings by Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse and Paul Cézanne, and Auguste Rodin’s drawings were first shown in America at 291. Marin and Maurer appeared on their heels. Maurer, like O’Keeffe, had studied with William Merritt Chase. Maurer’s father created Currier and Ives lithographs and never approved of his son’s modernist leanings. Shortly after his father passed away at the age of 100, Maurer committed suicide. The mercurial Weber was responsible for Henri Rousseau’s first U.S. exhibit, and he helped introduce cubism to America, a thankless task in 1911. According to the art historian Milton Brown, he was rewarded with “one of the most merciless critical whippings that any artist has received in America.” And it was an exhibition of Hartley’s work that first brought O’Keeffe to the 291 gallery where she met Stieglitz. Soon they would be lovers.

Though the works linked to O’Keeffe as a collector, or perhaps appreciator, in the exhibit are not the precise pieces she held in her collection, they are representative of those that were and of the relationships she enjoyed. Among the latter is her abiding friendship with Ansel Adams, who is represented by one of his prints of Yosemite Valley, a place O’Keeffe and Adams visited together. In a letter to Stieglitz, Adams wrote, “O’Keeffe is supremely happy and painting, as usual, supremely swell things. When she goes out riding with a blue shirt, black vest and black hat, she scampers around against the thunder clouds — I tell you, it’s something.”

The exhibit includes a photograph of Adams and O’Keeffe taken by Adams’ assistant, Alan Ross. “Ansel Adams was the first professional photographer to capture her on camera and then in 1981, close to both of their deaths, she went back to Carmel, California, and, as she’s setting up, she’s sort of smiling, his assistant took a quick snapshot,” says Archer.

Also included in this section of the exhibit is an Akari paper lantern by Isamu Noguchi similar to the one O’Keeffe alternately hung over her dining room table or her bed in her house in Abiquiu, New Mexico. There is a mobile by Alexander Calder — who designed the OK pin O’Keeffe wears in countless photos — that is analogous to the one O’Keeffe hung in her New Mexico home. A triptych of snow scenes done in the 1850s by Utagawa Hiroshige is also included as an homage to a similar threesome of Hiroshige woodblock prints from the same period that lived on the wall in O’Keeffe’s New Mexico home and are now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. And, naturally, there is a Stieglitz print, one of his most famous, also a snow scene. “I suddenly saw the Flat-Iron Building as I had never seen it before,” Stieglitz said. “It looked, from where I stood, as if it were moving toward me like the bow of a monster ocean steamer, a picture of the new America which was in the making.”

This intimate exhibition does not pretend to be, nor was it intended to be, an O’Keeffe retrospective. It does not deal with her complicated relationship with Stieglitz — who never ceased to promote O’Keeffe’s work — their lengthy affair before his divorce, their subsequent marriage and, later, his affair with his gallery director, Dorothy Norman. It doesn’t delve into her mental and physical breakdowns in the ’30s nor does it touch on the sexuality, male and female, that is often ascribed to O’Keeffe’s work and which she steadfastly refused to acknowledge.

Like Stieglitz’s photo of the Flat Iron Building, O’Keeffe saw grandeur in her subjects. “She wanted the small things in nature that she loved to be just as impressive as the new trains and new planes,” says Archer, “to stop you in your tracks like you were looking at a skyscraper.”

The tightly knit exhibit, like the Ross photo, is a snapshot of the artist. “I hope people will leave with a fuller image of O’Keeffe’s engagement with the art of her time,” says Archer. “She developed a persona — helped by Stieglitz — of the remote, contemplative, detached doyenne of the desert. But she was keenly interested in her contemporaries’ work and unstinting with both praise and criticism.”  PS

Jim Moriarty is the Editor of PineStraw and can be reached at jjmpinestraw@gmail.com.

Mistletoe Farm — a sanctuary for creatures great and small

By Claudia Watson

Photographs by Laura Gingerich

A dreamy fog lifts from the pond below, softening the profiles of the distant trees as a chorus of field crickets, grasshoppers and late summer cicadas offer a prelude to the day’s soundtrack.

It wasn’t long before we saw them, several tiny heads peering from the water on the far side of the pond. Lookouts. When her sneakers hit the dock, and they hear the call, a flotilla of three dozen pond sliders and one giant snapping turtle rush in, grabbing the fish food she tosses.

The day begins and ends with this routine at Mistletoe Farm, the 11-acre Southern Pines farm of Drs. Jeff and Lynda Acker, where even the farm’s name suggests the couple’s gentleness for all living things.

Mistletoe, Lynda’s Belgian-cross horse, was rescued from a ski resort, where she pulled a sleigh. The Ackers brought her to this farm when they relocated from Asheville.

“She was a 2,000-pound golden retriever. She’d come up behind me and lick me on the head and follow me everywhere,” Lynda recalls while tossing more food to the turtles. “We encourage everything here.”

Then, prompted by the honking of a skein of Canada geese, she points to the pasture. “There’s a straggler Muscovy duck over there, a bit of a loner. We have at least one beaver family, green and blue herons, snowy egrets, kingfishers and killdeer. Little nuthatches nest in the post,” she says, showing the spot on the dock.

Soon, her husband, Jeff, arrives, and they grapple with the rowboat set ajar. “It’s got water in the bottom from the storm. We need to drain it,” she says. Though the sun’s up and there are chores to be done, they settle instead into weathered Adirondack chairs at the pond’s edge to enjoy morning coffee together.

When Lynda isn’t busy with farm chores, she’s often tending to serene spaces for healing and restoration. Her work includes the Healing Garden at the Clara McLean House and the Hospice Gardens at FirstHealth Hospice and Palliative Care. In addition, she’s been instrumental in developing the Native Pollinator Garden at the Village Arboretum in Pinehurst, and pollinator and ornamental gardens at The O’Neal School. Now, she’s working with a team to select the plants for two healing gardens at FirstHealth’s new cancer center in Pinehurst.

Her efforts are more than a hobbyist’s interest; she joyfully immerses herself in her endeavors. Most assume Lynda’s a botanist or etymologist because of her broad knowledge of plants and insects, specifically pollinators, but she is, at heart, a self-taught naturalist.

“I’m a biology nerd,” she says. “Sponge-like for certain topics, and my ears perk up when it’s an interesting subject.”

After obtaining a bachelor’s and master’s in biology and a Ph.D. in molecular physiology, she was awarded a MacArthur Foundation postdoctoral fellowship at Duke University. Then, she was off to the corporate world with pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline, finally founding and running a clinical documentation firm.

Though she spent years in business suits and high heels or a lab coat, Lynda says the most authentic time is when she’s out with either a shovel or fishing pole in her hand.

“My love of nature was planted, excuse the pun, very organically,” she says. Her father was a conservation officer at Chautauqua Lake, a 17-mile-long lake in western New York famous for its muskellunge (muskie), one of the largest freshwater fish native to North America. She grew up with a rescued deer fawn in their garage and a fishing pole in her hand by the age of 3. As a youngster, she ice-fished in huts on the lake with her father, along with “a bunch of Swedish men eating pickled herring and telling stories.” She had her muskie tags at 8 and, to this day, loves pickled herring.

But it’s always been the curiosities of nature that captured her attention. “I’d line up buckets in the backyard and monitor live experiments with minnows and mosquitoes,” she recalls. Her first job featured worms.

“At night, I’d go out with my white cat, Zucchini, and a flashlight to pull nightcrawlers out of the ground. I’d get two cents apiece, and Dad would steer all the fisherman my way,” she says. “I had a big box full and loved to watch them crawl.”

She also spent hours exploring the fields around their home in Chautauqua, often tunneling through the tall grasses, observing insects, then matting down a spot in the cool grass to sit, think and dream about someday going head-first into nature.

The Ackers return to Chautauqua often and spend several weeks there during the summer. Now, Lynda is a lecturer on native gardens, monarch butterflies and pollinators at Chautauqua Institution, a nonprofit education center.

Like an alarm clock, when the sun’s rays hit the beehive, warming it, the honeybees fly. At every turn, there’s a delight. Vividly colored flowers provide nectar for the native bees and honeybees. Plump red raspberries cling to their canes, begging to drop into your mouth. And a single, peachy pink “Lady Ashe” rose, given to Lynda by the Healing Garden’s original rosarian, Bill Shore, joyfully opens to the sun.

The quiet is broken by Lynda’s high-pitched call, “Come on, chickees.” A parade of eager chickens, including Prairie Bluebells, Asian Blacks, Silkies and hefty Brahma hens, emerge from all corners. The chickens’ clucking oddly melds with the soft rock music coming from a rusty radio strapped to the fence.

“It keeps the raccoons away and helps calm the chickens,” she explains while sprinkling dried mealworms as a treat for the chickens. “The beach music on Sunday mornings is their favorite.”

The chicken enclosure and multiple hoop houses are wrapped with hardware cloth to protect them from predators. Netting stretches across the top. It keeps the hawks away from the chickens but lets the songbirds and pollinators inside. Snakes are another issue.

“They freak me,” says Lynda, wincing as she turns to husband Jeff, a radiation oncologist affiliated with Moore Regional Hospital. He handles the oft-required repairs to the enclosure and deals with predator issues, among other tasks.

“We have a lot of black snakes. When the egg count dwindles, I’ll search for it and relocate it to the other side of the pond,” he says. “Of course, it’ll find its way back.”

A tasty abundance fills the vegetable and fruit hoop houses. Tomatoes, peppers, garlic, root vegetables, beans, 20 types of herbs, and a beautiful row of celery fill the space. Organic parsley is everywhere and covered in eastern swallowtail caterpillars that favor it. It’s planted in the hoop houses to protect the caterpillars from the chickens.

“Oh, there’s an egg,” exclaims Lynda with delight, pointing to a tiny white ball on the top of a leaf. Evidence of the butterfly’s visit.

Dozens of southern highbush (Vaccinium formosum) and rabbiteye blueberry bushes (Vaccinium virgatum) flourish in two blueberry houses. When the berries ripen, walk-by grazing is encouraged.

Later, Lynda’s up on a ladder, attaching stiff mesh Japanese fruit bags to protect clusters of Concord grapes, other varieties of bunching grapes, and the regional favorite, muscadines. Though she prefers Concords, they don’t do well in our climate.

“The Chautauqua Lake area is home to Welch’s grape juice and jam. I grew up on the Concord grapes grown in the region, and they remain my favorite. The grapes in these bags are the good ones for our table,” she says. “The chickens and mockingbirds get the rest.”

Fig trees complete the garden. Both a single Brown Turkey (Ficus carica ‘Brown Turkey’) and two Celeste (Ficus carica ‘Celeste’) trees provide a sweet snack. Unfortunately, not for her.

“My bees eat them before I can,” she says while warily picking one. “Once they crack open, you don’t want to pick it. The honeybees will be in it.” Figs, she explains, are a food source for bees, and the sweet fruit significantly pumps up the bees’ honey yields.

It’s a short walk up the hill where an elegant lanceleaf Japanese maple (Acer palmatum var. dissectum) graces the entry to the iron and glass greenhouse. When the Ackers built the greenhouse, they, like most, wanted a place where they could grow plants that wouldn’t normally grow here and also to extend their growing season.

For many years, it was a hub of activity. Boston ferns overwintered. They adopted massive staghorn ferns (Platycerium spp.) from friends who migrated here from Florida. An enormous schefflera made this home after starting life as a bonsai in Hawaii. And that rubber tree?

“It was a houseplant, and for some reason, it ended up in here,” explains Lynda as she looks up through the plant’s canopy, which touches the greenhouse’s ceiling. “It grew through the table and took root in the ground. We’ve cut it back several times, but it owns the place now.”

When the greenhouse was humming, Lynda added praying mantises and green lacewings to the mix to keep the pest insects down. “I’d find baby praying mantises everywhere, and it was so magical,” she recalls.

Today, the greenhouse gives the couple a quiet place to repot plants over the winter months. “There are days I’ll come out here for a dose of sunshine and peace,” says Lynda, who found it a haven during the pandemic. “I don’t know what I’d do without nature. It makes me tick. It’s always been the underpinning of my life.”

The climate in the greenhouse is perfect for Jeff to start hundreds of milkweed seedlings each winter. Most seedlings are destined for the Village Heritage Foundation’s annual spring plant sale to benefit the Native Pollinator Garden.

But the pièce de resistance is the monarch waystation habitat.

The waystation provides food and habitat for the struggling monarch butterfly population. Unfortunately, the monarch and other pollinators, like native bees and honeybees, are in a stunning decline. Scientists say it’s due to the loss of the insects’ habitat, the increased use of pesticides and herbicides, and environmental change.

Jeff’s domain is the waystation, located on the steep slope of the dam at the edge of the big pond. “I handle the planting, weeding and maintenance of this area. We don’t use any herbicides or pesticides, so it’s all done the old-fashioned way, by hand,” he says. “Planting is a process, and there aren’t shortcuts.” His shovel hits the hard ground with a thwack. “It’s solid clay, so every time I plant, I dig a big hole and fill it with good dirt. That’s why there’s a big compost pile over there.”

Though a layer of pine straw helps hold the soil moisture and keeps the weeds down, the recent addition of irrigation gives young plants a better chance to get established. “It’s also very welcome, since Jeff spent many a late afternoon roasting in nearly 100-degree heat watering the area,” adds Lynda.

The Ackers’ goal is to keep planting nectar plants and milkweed. Milkweed is the only plant on which monarchs lay their eggs, and their caterpillars feed. Last year, unfortunately, the Ackers ran out.

“Toward the end of the season, we had so many caterpillars that we had to leave many of them on the plants,” explains Jeff. If hand-raised, monarchs’ survival rate is likely to reach 80-95 percent, far exceeding the meager 2-10 percent of monarchs that survive to become butterflies in the wild.

They’ve had spotty results with common milkweed (Asclepias syriaca), the plant most people associate with the word “milkweed.” It blooms from late April until mid-May, which is suitable for the first generation of monarchs, those offspring of monarchs from Mexico hatched in the south and migrating north to lay eggs.

“The milkweed is finally getting established and running,” he says. It spreads by underground rhizomes and is better suited for large fields and pastures. Plus, the butterflies don’t favor it when there’s butterfly weed nearby.

“Butterfly weed (Asclepias tuberosa) stays small, and it will self-seed an area, so it is great in the garden,” he says. It’s also the variety he raises from seed each winter.

Showy pink swamp milkweed (Asclepias incarnata) prefers mucky or very moist soil, so they’ve planted it near the water’s edge.

In addition, there are many other types of host and nectar plants to attract a wide range of pollinator species. Some favorites include dog-toothed daisy (Helenium autumale), which puts on quite a show in late August. The heat and drought-tolerant lanceleaf coreopsis (Coreopsis lanceolata) brings a big splash of yellow. And the sweet vanilla scent of Joe-pye weed (Eutrochium purpureum) is irresistible to pollinators.

Dragonflies prefer the long-blooming purple coneflower (Echinacea purpurea) and spiky prairie blazing star (Liatris spicata) for landing sites. Ohio spiderwort (Tradescantia ohiensis) and boneset (Eupatorium perfoliatum) attract native bees.

Lynda also plants the seeds of the fluffy-plumed purple celosia (Celosia argentea), which grows tall and needs the support of the fence near the hoop houses. Delicate, poppy-like windflowers, commonly called anemones, and a bed of colorful mixed coreopsis sway in the breeze, attracting different species. But Lynda’s favorite is the brightly colored Mexican sunflower (Tithonia rotundifolia). Though it’s non-native, it’s striking and non-invasive. Its orange, zinnia-type flower is the “hands-down best bee and butterfly magnet,” she says. But it’s gangly, growing 4-to-6-feet, so best suited for the back of a border.

Mistletoe Farm is a living laboratory. Lynda’s excitement for nature is contagious, and before you know it, you’re walking softly and looking at the details.

“Oh, look,” she says and points. “Here’s a native bee asleep on the goldenrod (Solidago rugosa ‘Fireworks’). It has a drop of dew on it — they are so tiny and beautiful. There are over 4,000 types of native bees. About half are in serious trouble, and many are extinct. Since all are solitary, there is not a hive to go back to, so they curl up, like this little guy, and sleep on a plant.”

Lynda explains that native bees often lay their eggs in tunnels they make in riverbanks, barren slopes, a root ball or the edge of a forest. “Those are the places people often tag as unsightly, and it is bye-bye bee habitat. Or they see a bee and spray it,” she says.

“Over there is a gorgeous dragonfly, and all the little skippers flitting around, and a moth — all so beautiful. It just makes me nuts when I see someone spraying pesticides. Look at what they’re missing. What are they thinking? Oh, I saw a bug I don’t like, so let’s kill everything.”

Lynda encourages everyone to visit a waystation for a rich learning experience. Then, plant one.

“It can be a small garden planted with some milkweed and nectar plants. Or plant fields of it. It all helps the monarchs on their journey north then back again to overwinter in Mexico,” she says. “Pollinator gardens in our backyards, parks and school gardens will help end habitat fragmentation and the loss of our pollinators. Then, we’ll have a far more viable and vibrant natural community.”

Lynda readily admits she enjoys seeing visitors in the area’s pollinator gardens.

“When I see them with their grandchildren, and they are pointing out the native plants and pollinators by name, it’s so gratifying,” she says. “They’re passing along the knowledge to our future generations, and those generations are our best hope for our planet.”

Mistletoe Farm feeds the senses with its extraordinary and complex beauty. It is not just a meadow, a pond, a vegetable garden or a waystation, but the sum of the whole — a sanctuary for all creatures, great and small.”  PS

Claudia Watson is a regular contributor to PineStraw and The Pilot. If there’s a garden that you’d like her to visit, email cwatson87@nc.rr.com.