Thursday, September 29, 2016 – Boss’ on field trip, Watering, Durell Nelson, Sally & Richard Done, Stinging Nettle

Today we were on our own; both of our bosses, Scott Higley and Richard Hancock were in St. Louis today on a tour of the St. Louis Botanical Gardens with the interns. The Botanical Gardens is where Richard got his start as a horticulturalist after college. He worked his way up until he was the caretaker of two of the greenhouses.  He learned his craft well.

Richard left us a list of things “To Do” before he left. We were kept very busy. We started by watering all of the greenhouses and the benches. That’s when we met Pres. Durell Nelson. He’s the First Counselor in the Nauvoo Temple Presidency. Pres. Nelson was the head groundskeeper for all of Nauvoo and Carthage for 38 years before retiring. He also served as the Stake President of the Nauvoo Stake for many years. He was looking for us because he had a question about the Ginkgo Biloba tree at the Bushnell House in Carthage. He was hoping to get some “sucker shoots” from the base of the tree. I told him I was sorry but I was on a campaign against all sucker shoots on all of the trees in Carthage. We had a nice visit though and he even helped us finish our watering chores.

Our next assignment was for Sis. Johnson and I to take the watering truck and do the usual watering of all of the flower beds and planters all over the grounds of Old Nauvoo. Even though a lot of the flower beds & planters have been pulled during the last few days, the watering still takes a couple of hours to finish. 

Our next assignment was to pull weeds from around the “Purple Weeping Beech” tree in the front lawn of the visitor’s center. Since the limbs are “Weeping” and hang all the way to the ground, it hasn’t been weeded or cleaned all summer and there were a lot of weeds and several volunteer walnut trees growing up through the canopy. It really was a mess and Sis. Johnson & I really worked hard at cleaning it up.

 

The worst part of the cleanup of the Weeping Beech tree was the “Stinging Nettle” among all of the weeds under the tree. I discovered the Stinging Nettle the hard way while I was pulling weeds. Both of my wrists, just above my gloves, started to burn! I decided to back out from the thick growth of weeds to see what I was really pulling. That’s when I notice I was pulling a very large group of Stinging Nettle plants. There were still a ton left to pull but from then on I was much more careful and Sis. Johnson and I finished the job without further incident or pain.

When we used to work in Carthage we would be surprised by unexpected visits from old friends who happened by. Well, we’ve only been working in Nauvoo a few days and it happened again today. It was a pleasure to see our old friends, Sally & Richard Done from Arizona. They are returning from the open house of the Philadelphia Pennsylvania Temple and they’ve been visiting and touring a lot of the church history sights on their way home. They served a Senior couple mission in Philadelphia Pennsylvania in 2011-2013. We had a very nice visit with them.