THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, July 13, 1994 TAG: 9407120124
SECTION: ISLE OF WIGHT CITIZEN PAGE: 02 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: Linda McNatt
LENGTH: Medium: 95 lines
A hip replacement in 1989 has added a jaunty little hop to Eunice Darnell's gait. I noticed it as she made her way through her yard and into the garden.
But I soon discovered that Darnell, who will be 76 next month, walks sure-footed through rows of sweet potatoes, watermelons, tomatoes and flowers, flowers, flowers.
Another row of gladioluses had just been planted the night before, she told me, as she adjusted the cap she wore atop a thick crop of white curls.
She plants the glads in cycles so that some will be in full bloom throughout the summer months. She digs the bulbs each fall.
Darnell works in the garden during this hot weather in the early mornings and late evenings, trying to avoid the scorching sun.
It's the same sun that in the last several days has seemed to sap the life from her plants. When it's so hot, she said, shaking her head, even watering the plants doesn't seem to help much.
But Darnell is certain she'll have something blooming in the patch of flowers and vegetables fit to pay homage to her Lord this coming Sunday morning.
After all, he's never let her down. And if she can, she said, she plans not to let him down either.
She'll gather whatever she can find in her garden, arrange it in her prettiest vase. And just as she has for nearly a half century, she'll place that arrangement on the altar at Whitehead's Grove Baptist Church.
``The Lord and I have a contract,'' Darnell said, smiling. ``He does 95 percent of the work; I do 5 percent.''
She was handed the job when she was just 16, when her mother looked at her and said, ``Well, you're old enough to take care of the flowers now.''
Darnell said she knew that meant more than planting, fertilizing and watering. It meant plucking and arranging the flowers, and placing them in the church each Sunday.
It also meant making certain that something blooming would be available all year around. During certain seasons, she told me, she's forced to use just greenery, like at Christmas, for example. But she tries to add a bright ribbon for color, to make the arrangement as pretty as she possibly can.
``He deserves the best,'' she said, smiling.
And she depends a lot on her amaryllis during the winter months. She believes she has 400 or 500 bulbs. In the spring, she puts them outside in her garden to bloom.
In the fall, before the first frost, she brings them inside, leaves the tops on until they dry - ``You would cut off their lungs.''
Then she pots each bulb, puts in a couple of fertilizer spikes, places the pots in a warm place.
``Sometimes, I put 'em down by my refrigerator, where the warm air comes back down,'' she said, with a sly grin. ``I fool 'em. They think it's spring.''
Darnell left the church flower job to others for a few years, when she was a young woman working in a bank in Norfolk's Campostella section. Even then, though, she picked up some experience when she worked in a nearby florist shop on Mother's Day and Easter.
Darnell still enjoys growing the ``old-timey'' flowers, many of the same kinds her mother grew for the church. On the Sunday before the Fourth of July, she said, she had a basket filled with blue hydrangeas, daisies and red roses, with a red, white and blue ribbon.
She's done flowers for weddings and for funerals. She made her own father's casket spray.
``I had five big lilies in it,'' she recalled. ``I knew it would mean something to him because I grew them.''
Darnell gets a little help with the flowers now. Every once in a while, she said, some church member will place flowers in the church in honor or in memory of a loved one, and she gets a break.
That gives her more time to prepare her Sunday school lesson. She has taught almost every age group in the church, except for the smallest children. Currently, she teaches senior adults. When she isn't teaching them, she cares for them and others as well with her chicken soup and homemade rolls.
But the flowers usually accompany her on visits to the sick, to shut-ins, even to her bank and her doctor's office.
``Flowers just strike a chord with everybody,'' she said. ``If somebody is sick and you walk in with just one flower, it does something for that person.''
These days, Darnell said she doesn't get everything done that she'd like to get done. Cleaning house, for example, gets put off a little more often than it once did, when she was younger.
When that happens, she remembers one of her mother's favorite sayings: ``I've had dirt around me all my life, and I'll have a little on my face when I leave.''
But always, for as long as she's able, there will be flowers on the altar at Whitehead's Grove, put there by a woman who describes herself as an ``ordinary person.''
Others say she's an extraordinary lady. ILLUSTRATION: Eunice Darnell
Grows flowers for God
by CNB