a living legacy

The garden was her canvas, upon which she wove together textures, colors and fragrances to create living art.

By Carol Brock

You’re not a true gardener if you don’t dig in the dirt each day and water your plants with hoses (not sprinklers). At least, that’s what Bette Hinz believed. Up until her death two years ago at 85, she was in her daughter’s yard every day doing just that. And one glimpse at the lavish garden confirms that Bette was, indeed, a true gardener.

“Gardening was her passion,” says Bette’s daughter, Michele Obermeier. But it was more than that, too. The garden was her canvas, upon which Bette wove together textures, colors and fragrances to create living art. The pictures she painted are a legacy for her family and an inspiration to the Lafayette neighborhood where Michele and her husband, Bill, reside.

When the couple moved into their home in 1998, it had an expansive acre lot adjoining open space and contained a volleyball court—the perfect site for Bette’s new garden. “For me, the driver in buying this house was to give my mom a place to garden where she didn’t have to put all her hoses and equipment into her trunk to take them to a garden,” Michele says.

That’s because for most of her life Bette lived in an apartment in Arlington, Va., and gardened in a community garden. Even though Michele was able to give her mom a canvas, so to speak, she couldn’t get her to part with her “paintbrushes.” Bette still lugged her fork, hoe and other favorite tools back and forth between her Longmont home and the Obermeiers’ garden “until the very end. We had equally lovely tools here, but she wouldn’t use them.”

Bette’s rationale may have been that her tools were like old friends—reliable and shaped by the time they’d spent together. And Bette spent a lot of time with her tools. At age 77, when most people have begun to slow down, Bette began designing the Obermeiers’ garden—no small feat. Sprawling over a half acre, the couple’s garden includes a kitchen garden with edible herbs and flowers, a bulb garden, a rose garden, a perennial garden, an annual garden, a gigantic vegetable garden, and a fruit tree orchard.

Bette even brought some beloved Virginian vegetation with her to plant at the Obermeiers. “She wanted the garden to reflect her Virginia heritage and be low water—those were her two goals,” Michele says. Thus, blue, white and purple scabiosa abound, as do black-eyed Susans, Shasta daisies and purple hyacinth bean, which Bette grew from seeds she’d brought with her.

The massive undertaking required assistance, so the Obermeiers hired Boulder’s L.I.D. Landscapes to create the walkways and planting beds, and to remove the sandy soil to make way for a new mixture formulated by Bette. L.I.D. also installed the garden’s five faucets to minimize lugging hoses from one location to the next.

“Mom was a lifelong gardener, but this was her chance to create from scratch,” Michele says. “It was fabulous.” That hardly begins to describe the Obermeiers’ garden in the heights of spring, summer and fall. Each season ushers in a new profusion of blooms and vegetables, and Bette’s artistry is particularly apparent. “It’s like she painted with flowers,” Michele fondly says.

Perhaps because Bette was an artist in her own right. Although she worked as a budget analyst for the Federal Reserve Board in Washington, D.C., she could have made a decent living as an artist. Her paintings and sketches are framed throughout the Obermeier home, and some of her finest works, not surprisingly, are flower still lifes. She also did cross-stitch and needlework and made dollhouse furniture for Michele’s daughter, Lara, who now lives in Chicago and recently made the Obermeiers grandparents with the birth of her son, Will.

Not only did Bette’s garden artistry awe her family and the neighborhood, it inspired many paintings by Olga Plam, a well-known Boulder artist and family friend. “Olga would marvel at all the flowers and often talked to my mom about what was growing,” Michele says. She also took flowers from the garden to paint, and many of her now-famous paintings are of Michele’s garden flowers.

When Bette fell ill two years ago in summer, Olga stopped by with a blue bucket and filled it with flowers plucked from the garden. “Two weeks later she called and told me I should come see the painting she made from them,” Michele recalls. Olga had painted the flowers in a yellow vase as a tribute to Bette. “This is dedicated to your mother,” Olga told Michele. “These are her flowers. This is for her.” The painting now hangs in Michele’s home and she’s happy her mother got to see it before she passed away.

Grateful for Small Miracles

Now that the garden is solely in Michele and Bill’s hands, the couple is thankful for the many things Bette taught them. Both were neophyte gardeners in the beginning, says Michele, especially Bill, who is now the exclusive vegetable-garden caretaker and cooks healthy gourmet dinners with his bounty. “He became a master gardener under her tutelage,” Michele says with pride. “Mom worked hard at having us do things with her—and doing them over and over and over again—until we understood why you planted something at a certain depth or how long to water a certain plant.

“At the end she felt we were very competent, that the garden was in good hands because she had taught us to do things right. She felt that it would continue and that it would be beautiful.” If the couple ever does need information about a plant, they can find it in the garden journals Bette left behind, in which she recorded and illustrated her garden activities.

During the growing season, the couple spends every spare moment in the garden. “My mom would say, ‘this is a full-time job.’ She’d be here when I left for work in the morning and came home at night, but I didn’t really see the scope of it until I was here with her every day,” says Michele, who retired from a full-time US WEST position to be a telecommunications consultant.

And just like Bette’s community -garden in Arlington, the Obermeiers’ garden is a community affair. Lara and her husband, Keith, visit Boulder each May and help her parents with planting and other chores. Michele’s sister, Flavia Florezell, and her partner, Robert Reid, are in the garden as often as possible. Michele’s friends also pitch in and neighbors love to share in the harvest. “It’s a family activity,” Michele says. “It certainly is a part of the neighborhood; almost all the neighbors are in and out of the garden many times during the summer. It really adds to the fabric and quality of life here.”

It also adds to the lives of those who are less fortunate, as each day in summer the Obermeiers donate boxes of fresh organic produce to the Sister Carmen Community Center in Lafayette, a charity that provides assistance to Louisville, Lafayette and Superior residents.

Just as Bette’s garden united the community, her artistry has come full circle in her daughter. Michele, who never thought she was artistically inclined, recently tried her hand at botanical illustration. Her very first drawing of bunchberry dogwood was selected for display at Denver Botanic Gardens during last summer’s “Plants of Lewis & Clark” exhibit. “I thought my mom was the artist, but I’d had this itch to do it,” says Michele, who has taken botanical illustration classes at Denver Botanic Gardens and the Royal Botanic Gardens in Sydney, Australia. “Nobody can believe it that my very first piece actually got into the show.”

One person would, however. And her legacy lives on in both her daughter and her garden.

Carol Brock is editor of Boulder County Home & Garden Magazine and was inspired by the size, beauty and tale of the Obermeiers’ garden.

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