Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Gardener blossoms
Volunteer Ward called cornerstone of botanical garden.
Consider yourself lucky if you ever get the opportunity to take a personal tour of the Botanical Garden of the Ozarks with Martha Ward. Ward — who has one of the longest histories with the BGO as a 19-year volunteer and former Board member
— knows every nook and cranny of the
40-acre site like it was her own backyard. She introduces horticulturist April Price, who is out busily planting on a May morning, and Director of Operations Gerald Klingaman.
“He’s the operations director, but he’s out here pulling weeds,” she marvels before calling out, “Hi, Gerald!”
Ward’s affection for the place is evident.
“When you drive in, no matter how you feel, when you see the gardens, it’s uplifting,” she declares. “It just makes you happy.”
Ward can recite the history of the BGO without notes: A small group of determined community members formed the Botanical Garden Society of the Ozarks in 1994, though it would be 13 more years before the garden would open its doors. Those 13 years were full of fits and starts, progress and setbacks. The only thing that kept the project moving forward was the dogged commitment of its supporters and their refusal to give up.
It was a long, hard road, says Ward, who started working as the Board treasurer in 1998, but it was worth every minute of toil and trouble.
“What I saw in Martha early on is her total dedication to the projects she’s involved in,” says friend Georgia Ross. “You can always count on her. And her attitude is so positive that it’s infectious to others around her, and then they too want to get in and get involved.”
“[Horticulturist] Susan Riggins and I were standing here one day, and I said, ‘Susan, there’s something
“Martha is just a foundation, a cornerstone of the Botanical Garden of the Ozarks. She was here at the very beginning, involved with the early fundraising and programming, and is still a volunteer. Our guests love her, our staff loves her, and our other volunteers love her.” — Botanical Garden of the Ozarks Executive Director Charlotte Taylor
magical about this place,’” remembers Ward. “‘You know, it’s gone through its ups and downs, we’ve got no major benefactor, but here we are.’ She said, ‘Martha, there are so many spirits here,’ and she didn’t mean people who had worked here and died, she meant all the input of all of the individuals that have come and put in their love, dedication, creativity — now when I come out here, that’s what I think.
“You don’t carry a public garden through without major benefactors if there’s not love and creativity in it.”
The Botanical Garden of the Ozarks boasts 12 themed gardens organized around a circular Great Lawn.
“They were supposed to be backyard gardens, but they got a little fancier than that,” says Ward. “Each one was to have a shade feature, a water feature and a place to sit.” Ward’s personal favorite — though she admits it’s difficult to narrow it down — is the Children’s Garden, designed by Gerald Klingaman, Scott Starr, Cindi Cope, Gail Pianalto, Joyce Mendenhall and Betty Swope from the original design by Stuart Fulbright. This space is rich with whimsical touches like the eagle’s nest, a mosaic butterfly and dinosaur tracks on the path through the garden.
PLANTING SEEDS
Ward muses that her love of gardens comes from her father, LeeRoy Callahan, who was a farmer in tiny Traskwood, a town outside of Benton.
“You couldn’t make a living just on the farm, so he would pick up some carpenter work,” she says. “He did the census, he clerked sometimes at the local store. … He did whatever he had to do.”
A widower with three children when he married Ward’s mother, Eunice, he would eventually have three more children, Ward and her two sisters. Ward’s birth was difficult, due to her large birth weight, and both her and her mother’s lives were threatened during delivery until a doctor used forceps to pull Ward out of the birth canal. The act saved both of them but damaged a nerve in the baby’s right side, leaving Ward with a paralyzed left arm.
“I grew up using just one arm,” says Ward. “When I was young, there was nothing they could do about that. Now, they could transplant nerves.”
Though today Ward is known for her upbeat, sunny personality, her early years were plagued by loss: Her half-sister died of appendicitis, a half-brother was killed in World War II, and her beloved father died when she was just 4 years old.
“My father, I guess, was very partial to me because of my disability,” says Ward. “He took me everywhere he went. He had heart attacks before he had the one that took his life, and they tell me that he had one while he was driving [with me in] an old car. He knew it was coming so he parked and
got out. When he came to, I was sitting on his chest.
“I do worry a lot about things, and I probably have more fears than most because of those events.”
A shy child, Ward was a good student who really hit her stride when she discovered a talent for mathematics. For that discovery, she credits a dynamic math teacher, Mrs. Perrin, whom she remembers fondly.
“When I think about her, I see her covered in chalk dust from head to toe,” says Ward with a laugh. “I don’t know what she did to that chalkboard.
“Mrs. Perrin expected students to work hard, but she was also full of encouragement. She gave me the self-confidence to believe that I could follow in her footsteps to be a woman mathematician. I was the only girl in the advanced class in high school.”
Ward headed to the University of Arkansas following graduation, where she majored in mathematics. She soon found the subject area as lacking in female representation at the college level as it was at the high school level.
“There was never another woman in any of my math classes,” she says. “I was with mostly male engineers. I only knew one female engineer, and she wasn’t in any of the same math classes that I was.”
With her strong college transcript and a major in a field that was in high demand at the dawn of the computer age, Ward didn’t have to worry about finding a job. By senior year, she had two companies courting her. One was General Electric, located in Cincinnati, and the second was the famed Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee.
“[GE] flew me to Cincinnati to be interviewed,” says Ward. “For a shy, young girl, naive, with little knowledge of the world, to fly to Cincinnati was …” She trails off in wonder. “But no one smiled at me the whole time except for the hotel doorman. It just wasn’t southern. People weren’t talking to other people. I mean, I talked to everyone here. You’re in a grocery store in line, you talk to the person next to you. But it was interesting.”
GROWING CAREER
Luckily, Oak Ridge came through with a job offer,
and Ward was able to stay in the South. With her mother’s car and her sister’s help, she packed up her things and moved to Tennessee. It was heady stuff for the small town girl.
The city of Oak Ridge was developed in 1942 by the United States Army Corps of Engineers as part of the Manhattan Project. The facility of Oak Ridge National Laboratory was used to separate uranium isotopes for the construction of atomic bombs, and the project was the subject of a 2014 book called The Girls of Atomic City, which details the work of young women during World War II who helped build atomic bombs with no knowledge that they were doing so. When Ward arrived at Oak Ridge in the mid-1950s, there was still an air of mystery about the place.
“One had to have a security clearance to work at Oak Ridge,” remembers Ward. “I was aware they were checking my background and interviewing people that knew me before they hired me. The programs I wrote could have been secret, but I never felt as though I was being kept in the dark. I just never asked, and no one shared any information. I just assumed the equations pertained to the reactor at the lab.”
Ward and her co-workers wore special tags during their shifts that were scanned for radioactivity on their way out of the door.
“We had what they call ‘a spill’ one day when I was there, and they had to check our shoes,” remembers Ward. “I do remember looking down into the water there to see the radio isotopes, because they were doing medical studies there.
“There was a lot going on.”
At first, her living situation wasn’t much different than living on campus in college. Employees were housed in dormitory-like buildings with communal bathrooms and no kitchens to speak of. Once she had been working for a few weeks, however, Ward met another young woman who was interested in renting an apartment together, and the two moved into a tiny efficiency.
“Every weekend, we would take off and see some other part of Tennessee,” says Ward of this idyllic
time. “One weekend, we took our books and went to a cabin, and one time we went into North Carolina and I learned about the Cherokees. She was Catholic, so I would take a book, and she would take a hat. She would go to church, and I would read the book in the car. She never missed Mass.”
Ward met her husband, Mike, who was also employed at ORNL, under circumstances that, Ward says, they still argue over: Ward turned in a punch card with a completed equation to Mike, whose job it was to run the card through the computer. Ward’s card, however, jammed the machine.
“I handed it to him, and it was sort of frayed, so the card reader started jamming and chewing it up,” says Ward. “That’s my story. His story is that I forgot to take the rubber band off.”
The two mathematicians began dating, but the future of the relationship seemed uncertain when Mike returned to his native Minnesota to be closer to family. That changed when the two met for a weekend in Chicago.
“We stayed with my cousin, and she had a cot in the hall for him,” says Ward. “She had a 6-week-old baby. I knew nothing about 6-week-old babies. We were shopping for presents for the 6-week-old because we felt so bad about staying with them.” Over lunch at Chicago’s iconic downtown Marshall Field’s store, Mike proposed. Ward packed her bags and left the South to head up to Minneapolis.
A BOUNTIFUL HARVEST
Ward says raising a family in Minneapolis was ideal. The couple had three children and, eventually, they purchased a house steps from a park, a school, the bus line and the trail system.
“All of the neighborhoods in Minneapolis were designed so that every neighborhood had a park and an elementary school,” she explains. “So there were no school buses, there was no lunch program. All the kids came home for lunch at noon. If you had to go somewhere, you had neighbors that had children and maybe every other week, one would take the children for lunch, and then the next week the other one would
take the kids.
“When Hillary [Clinton] talks about, ‘It takes a village,’ my daughter would tell you that she was raised by a village. One neighbor belonged to a co-op, and she learned about co-ops through her. Another would hire her to come over and help her get ready for parties. Another neighbor taught her how to grow things from seeds. So she was really raised by a village.”
When raising three children made having a full-time job difficult, Ward found another way to continue her career: She started her own accounting business. She got her initial exposure to accounting when she volunteered to keep the books for the Jefferson Center for New Democratic Processes, a non-partisan nonprofit founded in 1974 by political scientist Ned Crosby. Ward volunteered to be a part of the Citizen’s Jury established by the Center, the main purpose of which was to encourage the average citizen to get more involved with local and national politics. But when Crosby discovered her math background, he capitalized on it. Ward returned to school to learn the basics of accounting, which she picked up quickly.
“Next thing I knew,” she says, “I had my own business.”
Once the children were raised, though, it was hard to justify living through the long, frigid Minnesota winters, so the couple decided to return to Fayetteville for retirement. They settled into a house near Wilson Park, which reminded Ward of her parkside home in Minneapolis.
The move, says Ward, was absolutely the right one to make.
“When Lioneld Jordan says, ‘Don’t you just love Fayetteville?’ I want to yell, ‘Yes!’” says Ward. “I’ve met so many people that I wouldn’t have had the chance to meet otherwise. Minneapolis is big, but there’s not as much community there. I know so many people here — Greg Leding, my state representative, I know personally.”
With a burgeoning political awareness that was started by her experience at the Jefferson Center, Ward jumped into political activism in Arkansas with
both feet.
“I mean, I always voted, but we came back here, and I got very involved,” she says. “I had never been on a march until I came here. I went to my first rallies here.
“It’s just so easy to get involved here.”
Since her return to Fayetteville, Ward has volunteered or worked not only with the Botanical Garden, but also with the League of Women Voters, the Fayetteville Public Library, Democratic Women, Faith in Action and Habitat for Humanity. For some of those organizations, she’s utilized her special math talents and served as treasurer.
Though she’s dedicated and enthusiastic about all of these causes, her heart beats the strongest for the BGO.
“You can tell she loves this place passionately,” says BGO executive director Charlotte Taylor. “She knows what a botanical garden is all about, and she can see what our vision is. She knows we’re small right now, but she knows we can be bigger and better for our community. It is so great to have someone who has that vision working with us.”
When Ward worked with the organization’s education program, Little Sprouts, she met a little girl who was so excited about the tiny potatoes she had harvested and was bringing home. Ward asked her what she planned to do with the vegetables.
“She said, ‘I’m going to put mine in the sun and see if they grow bigger,’” remembers Ward. “And off she went, full of excitement to begin her experiment. And I left with the hope that I’d just met a future woman scientist or perhaps a woman gardener — someone who would find as much joy as I have working with flowers and plants and who, perhaps, would one day volunteer at BGO.”