was over 35 people in one of the gardens singing a capella barbershop-style.”
More important for my purposes, Laine practically lives outside during the summer. I figured that she would be feeling my pain.
I couldn’t have been more wrong.
Between hosting girlfriends for a fireside luncheon and playing pickleball at the Westerville Community Center, Laine squeezed in time to update me on how she packs her winter days full of gardening activities.
“This year, we finished boxing up the dahlias the week of Thanksgiving, which took us into holiday shopping and feeding everyone,” said the native of Long Island, New York.
To get their outdoors fix: “We pick up flowers for inside and start looking in catalogs to get ideas on what to plant. Jeff repairs the birdhouses that aren’t doing so well. I start buying my fairy-garden items. Jeff and I have taken classes on how to make yard sculpture, so we also make sheetmetal yard sculptures.”
They visit the Franklin Park Conservatory and Botanical Gardens as well as home-andgarden shows, and they race to be the first to read articles from their favorite garden experts.
Their bird feeders, some of which they leave out year-round, also demand attention.
“We put out fresh food every day — suet pellets that are good for their coats — and we have a heated bath for them,” Mrs. Laine said.
And birds aren’t the only nonhumans atttracted to their property.
“We are a Certified Wildlife Habitat,” Mrs Laine said. “We have had deer, groundhogs, skunks, rabbits, chipmunks, opossum, raccoons, fox, American kestrel hawk, coyotes, squirrels and many assorted birds, I think all this year alone.”
She and her husband are also making a video about how to grow prize-winning dahlias. It features Dick Westfall, president of the Dahlia Society.
And, she added: “I’m on a national dahlia society Facebook page, and I discovered this when one day we were dividing up our dahlias and one was gigantic. I put the photo out and said, ‘What would you do with this dahlia?’ And people from all around the world answered.”
(Facebook translates, Mrs. Laine added.)
Along with everything else she does, she said, those socialmedia connections keep her “very occupied” during wintertime.
So Linda Laine didn’t commiserate with me.
But she did inspire me.