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While the storm Monday did its damage, it also increased my vocabulary. Derecho is not a word I use on a daily basis, but I understand that is exactly what we had and what damaged old and new trees, sent flowers to an early demise and bent my heirloom tomatoes, heavy with green fruit, nearly to the ground.

Hopefully, derecho will stay tucked back in our minds and not needed to describe any winds for some time. (However, it is in the Scrabble dictionary, and for us Scrabble nuts, it would make a great bingo.)

On the Friday before the storm, Beth and John Beasley and the members of their gardening group held their Fabulous Flower Fundraiser, and it was a great success. Donations came to around $2,500, which was given to the CommUnity, formerly the Crisis Center.

All the flowers were grown in the garden they maintain just behind the white house at the corner of Iowa City's Rochester Avenue and Scott Boulevard.

About 10 years ago, John approached the owner and asked if this group could make a garden in the home's backyard. Permission was granted and the clearing started, but it was two years before it was ready for planting. Since then, the group has grown vegetables along with the flowers, and some 400-500 pounds are donated each year to the food bank.

Black-eyed Susans, zinnias, bee balm and sunflowers are at their blooming best right now. There is a field of sunflowers just as you turn into the drive that has special meaning. Loren and JoAnne Leach, both Johnson County Master Gardeners, planted them several years ago with great success. People stopped by to snap pictures of these special “happy flowers.”

Loren passed away a few years ago and the family maintained the sunflowers in his memory, but they asked the Beasleys and their group if they would take it over.

Beth says the flowers were a little bent with the wind on Monday, but by Wednesday, they were already seeking the sun and she held hope they would recover.

There is another prized plant in the middle of this garden: A rhubarb patch several feet long and wide is believed to be at least 70 years old and it is still producing. A neighbor in that area remembers playing around it when she was a little girl.

This is a special garden, rife with history, cared for carefully by this group of talented gardeners, and providing enjoyment and food for many others.

They plan to have another Fabulous Flower Fundraiser next year, so keep it in mind for early August 2021 and keep words like derecho safely tucked in the back of your mind.

Judy Terry is a freelance gardening writer. Her columns appear Saturdays in the Press-Citizen and on Press-Citizen.com.

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