Born to Garden

Parents and grandparents instilled Eugenia Best's love early on

Eugenia Best’s love for gardening blossomed in her youth.

Her father always had a large vegetable garden and her mother cultivated irises, daffodils, shrubs and other decorative plants. Her grandparents were also avid gardeners.

It’s no surprise, then, that Best is one of Gaston County’s Master Gardeners. In fact, she is the president of the local Master Gardener Club.

“My father started me when I was really small,” she said. “He told me one time, ‘There’s just something special about putting something in the ground and watching it grow.’ ”

Best spent her youth in rural South Carolina, but eventually moved from her hometown of Whitmire to Stanley, where she taught at Springfield Elementary School. In 2003, after 31 years in public education, she decided to take early retirement. A year after that, she decided to take her lifelong love of gardening to another level by joining the Master Gardener program – a program offered by the N.C. Cooperative Extension Service that teaches amateur gardeners everything there is to know about the art.

“I thought I knew a lot about gardening before I took (the Master Gardener) course. Then, I realized how much I did not know,” she said.

Much of Best’s time now is spent either in the garden, communing with fellow gardeners or teaching someone about gardening. And she wouldn’t want retirement to be any other way.

“As a Master Gardener, you have to give at least 20 hours of service a year to the community and we do that through our outreach committee,” she said. “We’ve got several projects lined up this year.”

Among the activities Master Gardeners can get involved with are public gardens, like the ones that have cropped up at many elementary and middle schools; taking field trips to private gardens in North Carolina and the Southeast; giving gardening presentations to clubs and organizations; and manning the gardening hotline at the local Cooperative Extension office during the growing season.

“This time of the year, you’ll get a lot of phone calls because people are geared up to get their gardens and lawns going,” she said.

Best said much of the concern for gardeners this year is the drought. It’s made a lot of folks rethink their spring planting routines. “Everyone is asking, ‘What are we going to do about this drought?’ ” she said. “(Gardening experts are) telling us to try to get more plants that are drought-tolerant than what we’ve been planting in this area, such as succulents, cacti, sedums – plants like that. We’ve been getting rain right now, but I’ve heard that after the April rains, it’s going to be dry again.”

Besides looking at drought-resistant plants, Best said this year’s spring gardeners may want to focus more on perennials (which return each year) than annuals (which must reseed each year).

What gardeners do and don’t do may also depend on whether they have well water or municipal water. With Stage 3 water restrictions in place in much of Gaston County, municipal residents won’t have the luxury of pumping gallons upon gallons of water into their flowerbeds and vegetable patches.

Best knows firsthand how frustrating mandatory water limits can be. “I worked at a garden (in Stanley) last year that required a lot of water and we couldn’t water because of the restrictions. So, I just had to let the plants die. It was sad.”

Regardless of the conditions, Best will have a garden of some kind in her backyard this spring and summer. There’s no other choice when it’s your passion.

“When I pick that first ripe tomato or that first squash or those first beans, and take that basket into the house, it’s just a thrill to see what you have accomplished,” she said.

“I love to get my hands in the dirt. It’s great therapy.”

For more info on the Master Gardener program, call Julie Flowers at 704-922-2104.