The Story of a Garden

By Patrick L. Delabrue

Here’s flowers for you:
Hot lavender, mints, savory, marjoram,
The marigold, that goes to bed wi’ the sun,
And with him rises, weeping.
Perdita, speaking in William Shakespeare’s “The Winter’s Tale”, act 4 sc. 4,1. 103-6

VERMILLION, S.D. — Riding the crest of a warm, summer breeze, a crescent-eyed robin lands in the birdbath that is the centerpiece of the Shakespeare Garden on the University of South Dakota campus.

It dips its head in and out of the water, drinking and singing before flying into the cloudless early June sky.

Surrounding the birdbath is a geometrically precise arrangement of 79 species of esoteric flowers and herbs.

The base color of the manicured green grass jumps over the black soil and climbs up the stems of the flowers before exploding into a multitude of whites, yellows and light purples.

A white peony bows from the top-heavy flower and the rains that fell in the previous days. Its glory is fleeting; a peony flower’s prime lasts from mid-May to mid-June.

Visitors to the garden show interest in its geometric precision and display an appreciation for the color, smell and beauty the garden offers to a person seeking respite, a quiet lunch or a few minutes with a book.

That’s what brings Sally Slama to the garden.

Slama, a secretary in academic affairs at USD, lives in Yankton and can’t go home for lunch. Instead, she comes to the garden when the weather is nice.

“I like to come and look at the flowers,” she says. “I walk around the gardens and see if there’s anything I want to add to my garden at home. It’s a nice, relaxing place to come for lunch.”

The garden’s formal dedication happened on April 23, 1988, the observed birthday of William Shakespeare.

According to the USD Web site, the idea for the Shakespeare Garden was born during a conversation between two retired professors, William O. Farber and Raphael Block.
Block was fond of the section of the Huntington Garden in San Marino, Calif., that highlights flowers, herbs and shrubs mentioned in Shakespeare’s writings. He was inspired to implement the same kind of garden on the USD campus. The USD Emeritus Club took responsibility for funding the garden’s construction and the labor and materials needed to for its maintenance.

Cindy Gehm, 51, has been in charge of maintenance and landscaping of the garden for the past 13 years.

With black soil under her fingernails, Gehm, wearing dirty jeans, a gray long-sleeve shirt and a headscarf with a print of the Rocky Mountain National Park, toiled in the garden along with supervising three summer workers to pull weeds and plant annuals.

“Shakespeare Garden has a plan,” she said. “It’s very weedy, and when your dealing with a garden that has a lot of herbs and perennials, often the perennials and herbs will look like the weeds, so I’m instructing them on what are the weeds and what needs to be kept.”

The garden’s original design was the responsibility of Joseph Hoffman, the university’s head gardener, but Gehm now oversees the garden.

“What I did three years ago has rearranged it some,” Gehm said. “Trees have grown, the soil got bad and things weren’t growing very well so I redesigned it somewhat, but I kept all the same plants.”

Gehm’s three summer workers weed and plant under the shade of Shakespeare’s trees: ash, dwarf cherry and linden.