Botany whiz shares bounty of beauty
KATHLEEN MERRYMAN; THE NEWS TRIBUNE
Published: August 6th, 2007 01:00 AM
Enlarge imageSheldon Arkin presents Tacoma General patient Cathie Longstreth with flowers and a teddy bear. Arkin is behind the gardens at several MultiCare hospitals.
| DREW PERINE/The News Tribune |
Enlarge imageDREW PERINE/The News Tribune
Sheldon Arkin tends to his garden last month at his home in Tacoma’s South End. His yard is filled with plants ranging from lilies and lilacs to a banana tree.
Enlarge imageDREW PERINE/The News Tribune
Arkin moves through the halls of Tacoma General last month, delivering bouquets donated by florists and supplemented by roses from his garden.
Early in a summer evening, the top of Sheldon Arkin’s nearly bald head glistened with sweat, and a patch of gold. He’d been deadheading in the Eden he’s created at his home near Whitman Elementary School.
In the 14 years he and his wife, Patsi, have lived there with their three daughters, he’s turned an ordinary lawn into a tumble of colors and scents.
“I can’t count how many people stop to look at his yard each day,” said Pat McGregor, who lives a block away. “I am amazed daily at the attitude he brings to our neighborhood. The great thing about Sheldon is his willingness to share information and plants.”
Sheldon’s botanical genius and generosity spreads far beyond his home to his neighborhood and local hospital campuses, where thousands have surely enjoyed his work.
He gave plant starts to the kids at Whitman, and when those were stolen, he gave them more.
He planted a traffic circle with rugosa roses. When a neighbor claimed allergies and cut them all down, he started again with different flowers.
In the warm evening, Arkin bent to weed among his lilies.
“Most normal people have one of those brown yard-waste containers,” he said. “I have three.”
Technically, he has two. The third belongs to a senior neighbor. But he does her yard, from the impatiens and Japanese maple in front to the tomatoes in back. They’re kitty-corner to the vegetable garden he works on with a neighbor. Tomatoes. Squash. Onions. Needs weeding, he says.
So, yes, three.
“I’m a shoehorn gardener,” Arkin said. “You have this thrill of buying something, and then you need a shoehorn to get it in.
The upside: You crowd out the weeds.
The downside: Arkin doesn’t see one.
He’s a proud scrounger.
“Lean up against that power pole,” he said. “Really, lean on it, because when I tell you about the sale I found, you’re going to fall over.”
Seventy-five percent off, he said, roses, perennials and trees.
“I spent over $1,000 for the hospital,” he said. “They give me a free hand.”
That free hand has created hospital campuses unlike any others.
The centerpiece is the Mary Baker Russell Rose Garden at the center of the MultiCare Medical Center’s complex in Tacoma.
Roses by the hundreds romp among animal topiaries and beds of exuberant annuals and perennials.
Arkin planted an herb garden nearby.
When Mary Bridge Children’s Hospital was rebuilt, he arranged for alligator topiaries in the flower-stuffed roundabout. Inside the hospital, he designed a waterfall and stream in a courtyard where kids can sneak along a path carpeted in Corsican mint or sit on a bench and smell lilies.
There’s a centerpiece sculpture, but Arkin has added his own bits of whimsy – ceramic frogs conferring around a stone, penguins ready to surf the falls. Plastic bugs and frogs have popped up among the plants. Young patients bring them, said ambulatory services representative Patty Lee.
Arkin knows that when kids stick a plastic beetle under a begonia, they’re exercising a sense of ownership. That’s a big deal for a kid who’s gone through all the pokes and jabs and pain of a chronic illness.
He knows what they’re enduring, and the value of a sly prank and a laugh.
“On Super Bowl Sunday 10 years ago, I got the most incredible stomachache,” he said. “I just doubled over with pain.”
Over the next months, doctors tried to diagnose and cure the problem. Whatever it is, it is screwy, rare and pancreatic, Arkin said.
The pain was, quite literally, killing him. He couldn’t eat or sleep and dropped to 118 pounds. Doctors asked if he wanted an experimental pump that sends painkillers directly to the nervous system installed in his side.
“They told me the first guy who got (the pump) died, and the second guy wasn’t doing so well,” Arkin said. “I told them to go ahead.”
By and large, it works, though his disease, doctors tell him, will eventually develop into pancreatic cancer and kill him.
Arkin suspects the condition is the result of his contact with, of all things, a defoliant.
He had a lousy childhood, he said, until he landed in foster care with gardener Roy Eels in Los Angeles. Working with Eels on weekends, he learned to love plants, and went on to earn a degree in botany.
During the Vietnam War draft, he filed as a conscientious objector. The military picked up on his botany background and assigned him to work on Agent Orange and other defoliants.
The statues of St. Francis in his garden refer back to the days when he bounced around after the Army.
“I just like him,” Arkin said. “He’s my patron friend. There was a time I wanted to be a Franciscan brother. I went to a monastery in Santa Fe, New Mexico. That was 1974 or ’75. But they can’t talk!”
Arkin can’t not talk.
He talks about the botany and history of every plant in his garden.
He talks about the Russian circus tree he intends to build for the next Mary Bridge Children’s Hospital and Health Center’s Festival of Trees. He’s made one to three trees a year for the festival for 20 years. In the last five years, his trees have earned more than $100,000 for Mary Bridge.
He talks about meeting Patsi while they were both doing mission work in Texas, and about how proud he is of their daughters, Joelle, 21, Erin, 19, and Laura, 16.
“My wife’s scared. If I get sick and die, who’s going to take care of all this stuff?” he said, waving to the yard.
A Realtor friend has told him the garden will keep the house from selling. Arkin’s gardener’s soul tells him otherwise.
He sat down for a rest, and Joelle checked on him.
“Dad, you’ve got some gold stuff on your head,” she said.
It was lily pollen. A gardener’s halo.
In a sea of green, some plants are favorites
Sheldon Arkin loves to talk, especially about his plants.
Here are a few of the favorites in his yard.
Melianthus major, an evergreen shrub with long grayish leaves: “Touch the leaves. Now smell your fingers. A lot of people call this the peanut butter plant. Do you smell it? I got this at Jungle Fever.”
Lilacs: “They’re my wife’s favorite plant. These were in gallon pots when we moved in. Now they’re 20 feet high.”
Tomatoes: “I only plant Early Girls. I found the sunniest spot in the yard, and I put all these bottles in upside down around them to create heat for them. On a hot day, it’s really not all that good. See that? I’m burning them.”
Angel’s Trumpet, a tropical shrub with white trumpet-shaped flowers: “This one’s a datura. I got it for $1 at Fred Meyer on a rack of banged-up plants.”
Banana tree, about 10 feet tall “There’s my banana tree. It actually had a flower on it a few years ago. Last year it froze. Now it’s back.”
Kathleen Merryman: 253-597-8677
kathleen.merryman@thenewstribune.com