Largo rose gardener keeps love story alive
LARGO — On a dreary winter morning, as clouds shadow the cemetery, the resident rosarian bends between bushes looking for new life.
It’s Monday, his favorite day: Over the weekend, tiny green buds popped out of the thorny branches.
George Storm, 77, slogs through the mulch beds in a plastic poncho, snipping stalks to coax more blooms. When the downpour starts, he pulls up his hood and keeps clipping.
For 42 years, he has nurtured the roses at Serenity Gardens Memorial Park — keeping someone else’s love story alive.
••• Rimmed by a grove of live oaks and a creek, the rose garden is one of the largest on Florida’s west coast, sitting near the front of the cemetery. Ten beds cover over a half-acre — 368 bushes, 140 types.
Storm knows all their names and birthdays, which have heartshaped petals, whose look like teardrops, which scents linger longest.
Radio Times, one of the new varieties, has pale pink buds that burst into fluffy flowers. Mr. Lincoln, one of the oldest, boasts thick scarlet blooms.
Storm digs the holes, plants the baby bushes, erects wire fences to keep out rabbits. He waters them, fertilizes them, aerates their soil with a pitchfork. With a magnifying glass, he inspects leaves for insect larvae.
He has spent more than half his life in the garden.
He grew up in in his grandfather’s garden in Michigan, watching food grow, then studied horticulture at Michigan State. “I’m more of a vegetable man,” he says. “I’m one of three people in the country who can cross-pollinate celery.”
In Florida, he could grow things year-round. He started at a nursery, and when that closed, the unemployment office sent a postcard about a “job working with roses.”
At the Largo cemetery, he met the man who made the garden.
•••
After a quick turkey sandwich and thermos of milk in the funeral home, Storm returns to his sanctuary. Crystal raindrops glisten on the silky petals.
He stashes his poncho in his old hatchback and pulls out a white pith helmet to shade him from the sun.
He stoops a bit as he weaves between beds, carrying shears he calls “lobbers,” which require both hands. Branches go into piles, leaves in a black bucket. The biggest blossoms, he slides into a white pail.
Monday through Friday, from sunrise until 4 p.m., he works alone. Sometimes he hears music in his head: big band or gospel, hymns he sings in his Methodist choir.
He listens to hawks calling overhead, a dog barking in the distance, the excavator digging another grave.
When visitors stroll through, he answers their questions. But he can go a week without talking to anyone — not even the flowers. “They never talk back.”
He never stops to smell the roses or rest on the granite benches that frame them. Doesn’t think about the buried souls surrounding him. He’d never noticed the names etched into headstones: FLOWERS behind the garden, ROSEMAN beside it.
But he takes great care of the columbarium where the garden’s namesakes are buried.
Last week, he planted miniature roses around it, varieties honoring the Sturgeons’ story: Gift of Love and Radiant Love.
By Valentine’s Day, the little bushes will be dripping with red and blush buds.
•••
Air Force Lt. Col. George Sturgeon served in both world wars and retired to Florida with his wife, Ann. In their 57 years of marriage, they shared a love of roses, growing prize-winning specimens, traveling to shows.
After Ann died in 1979, Sturgeon opened the garden with 600 blooming bushes, in her honor. He set aside money to pay a fulltime rosarian.
“He could have bought a big crypt or monument,” Storm says. “How wonderful, for so many people, that he invested in flowers.”
For a decade, until he was in
his 90s, Sturgeon worked in the garden with Storm. “He didn’t talk about his wife much,” Storm said. “But when he did, you could tell how much he loved her.”
All of the original bushes have died. This year, Storm added Plum Perfect — his first purple. He makes sure to keep some tri-colored granadas growing — Ann Sturgeon’s favorite.
•••
As afternoon shadows stripe the cemetery, the rosarian bends to lift his brimming bucket.
He drives the few steps to the office, where the roses’ sweet fragrance fills the funeral home.
He carries one bouquet to his boss, sets another on the front desk. “I like to share,” he says, smiling.
He has “never had a sweetheart” to give roses to. “Never met the right lady.” He’s always lived alone.
After work, in his mobile home, he watches NOVA on PBS or pops a Star Wars movie into his VHS. He doesn’t have a cell phone or computer. On weekends, he goes to the library to look up the latest research on roses.
Once a year, he visits his sister in North Carolina for a week. He can’t leave his roses any longer. “I worry about them,” he says. “They’re my children.”
Four decades of crouching and clipping, weeding and loading wheelbarrows has taken a toll. Storm’s back often aches; he sometimes has to prune on a stool.
But the fresh air and exercise — surrounded by flowers — he says, keep him healthy. He doesn’t want to retire. “What would I do?”
Besides, he says, he just planted dozens of new bushes.
“I have to stick around to watch my little ones grow up.”