Team plots improvements

By PETER H. MILLIKEN
VINDICATOR STAFF WRITER
YOUNGSTOWN -- Ambitious goals are being proposed for Fellows Riverside Gardens by a new management team, which features two newly hired plant experts with experience in prestigious public gardens elsewhere.
Renovating the fountain, extending hard-surface walkways, and raising money for a new greenhouse are among the items on the agenda of Keith S. Kaiser, who became Mill Creek MetroParks' horticulture director in January. Kaiser, who joined the park district in 1989, was previously its assistant horticulture director.
To help him achieve these and other goals, Ellen M. Speicher and Richard W. Kenyon joined the staff in May as assistant horticulture director and gardens supervisor, respectively.
"I want us to keep adding the new plant varieties that are developed so people can come to see them," said Speicher, a Woodworth native, who most recently served as horticulture director at Pittsburgh's Phipps Conservatory and Botanical Gardens. She predicted Fellows will expand its beech and rhododendron collections.
Speicher has a bachelor's degree in biology, with an emphasis in botany, and a bachelor's degree in music, with a major in voice, both from Youngstown State University. While earning her biology degree, she was a seasonal gardener at Fellows. "I've always loved the park since I was a child," she said.
Native of Britain
"I want to make it sort of like the No. 1 garden to come to, rather than amongst hundreds of gardens," Kenyon said of Fellows. Kenyon most recently was horticulture intern coordinator and shade garden manager at the Toledo (Ohio) Botanical Garden. There, he presented a weekly garden advice segment for a local TV station for three years.
"We have a very good beech collection, and maybe we can elaborate on some other trees and shrub collections," Kenyon said of Fellows gardens.
Before coming to the United States, Kenyon was a plant sales assistant at the Royal Horticultural Society in Surrey, England, from 1989 to 1995. Before that, he was a gardener at St. James Park, Kensington Gardens and Buckingham Palace from 1980 to 1989.
As a royal gardener, he assisted in preparing displays for the 1981 wedding of Charles and Diana and helped prepare for annual garden parties at Buckingham Palace.
Gardens' background
Although not as well-known as the royal gardens in England, Mill Creek Park's 12-acre Fellows Riverside Gardens draws more than 330,000 visitors a year from the Mahoning and Shenango valleys and elsewhere, with almost all states and about 20 foreign countries represented among the guests, Kaiser said.
Elizabeth Fellows, an avid gardener, who died in 1958, donated to the park the land and funds for the free, public display gardens bearing her name, which were first planted in 1963.
Today, the parks' horticulture department consists of 14 full-time and 25 part-time or seasonal employees, augmented by more than 320 volunteers, and it has a $950,000 annual budget. The gardens' $6 million D.D. and Velma Davis Education and Visitor Center opened in December 2000.
Having just established this summer a hands-on, interactive family garden for people of all ages, Kaiser said the gardens management plans to have mechanical and cosmetic renovations done over the next few months to the 30-year-old fountain that greets guests at the gardens' main entrance.
On Kenyon's late summer agenda this year is replacement of a section of 40-year-old yew hedge bordering the rose garden that had to be cut down because it suffered from a fungal disease that was worsened by heavy rains within the past 13 months.
The proposed new hard-surface walkways would protect the turf in areas of heavy foot traffic and could make the gardens more handicapped-accessible, Kaiser said.
Bigger greenhouse needed
Kaiser, Speicher and Kenyon agreed that Fellows has a shortage of greenhouse space.
This winter, the new management team hopes to plan for a new, larger greenhouse, which would require a fund-raising effort and could open two years from now, Kaiser said. The first priority would be a plant production greenhouse, with a display greenhouse being a second priority, he added.
In the gardens' current greenhouse, plants are stacked three-high on shelves, meaning that they get less than ideal sunlight directed onto them, Kenyon explained. A larger greenhouse might allow the plants to go out into the gardens in better condition, he added.
Reminiscing about his days in the royal civil service, Kenyon recalled meeting Queen Elizabeth II on his first day on the job in the Buckingham Palace gardens while she was walking her dogs.
"She was interested to know how the gardens were doing in relation to the dry weather that they'd had, and, of course, everything was looking brown and parched. So we just chatted about that," he recalled.
Kenyon also recalled attending a staff Christmas party at Windsor Castle, where he again met the queen.
Discoveries
"There are plants that I was familiar with in England that I didn't think would grow around here, but I now find that they do,'' Kenyon said of Youngstown.
"I don't know necessarily if I will have a completely English influence over the gardens [in Youngstown]. A lot of the plants I've grown up with came from other countries anyway," he said.
He noted that the British introduced to their gardens plants from areas they'd explored, including North America.
"I don't say that we do anything any better than anybody else. It's just we've done it longer," he concluded.
milliken@vindy.com