CAIRO — People who like to have the house to themselves would be jealous of Barb Kenny.
Her husband, Randy, spends a lot of time outdoors.
“He’s very seldom in the house,” Barb says.
Randy is usually outside tending to his amazing flower garden.
No matter what your favorite type of flower is, you’ll find it in his garden. You’ll also find tropical plants, which he protects each winter in his underground greenhouse.
The spectacular garden covers more than an acre outside their home, 12713 W. Abbott Road, which is southeast of Cairo. You can’t really appreciate the garden from the road. To get a good view, you have to pull into their driveway.
During the warm weather months, Randy spends at least seven or eight hours a day tending to his garden. But he doesn’t think of it as a chore. “It’s fun,” he says.
The late Ben Swanson, who owned Swanson’s Nursery, was a good friend of Randy’s.
“We talked flowers all day long,” he said.
Randy spent a lot of time with grass, trees and shrubbery during the 47 years he worked at Riverside Golf Course in Grand Island. He began when he was 15, making $1.10 an hour. He was superintendent of the course from 1990 to 2012, when he retired.
Six years ago, Randy was diagnosed with bone cancer. He had a shaft inserted in his right arm.
He concentrated on his garden to help rehabilitate his arm, and to get his mind off aches and pains that he feared might be related to cancer.
Caring for flowers and trees was a good distraction. But he got “too far into it to get out. I created a monster,” he says, smiling.
The flowers on the Kenny property include begonias, impatiens, petunias, geraniums, roses, vincas, zenias, dahlias, daylilies, hostas, salvia, snapdragons and caladium.
Trees include ornamental peach, umbrella crap apple. weeping cherry, chandelier pear and collumnar red oak.
In the underground greenhouse, Randy stores such plants as figs, palm trees and voodoo lilies.
He’s building an addition to the greenhouse, which will allow him to start plants in the winter months.
The garden consists of a mixture of annuals, perennials and bulbs. Each year, Randy digs up bulbs for elephant ears, cannas and other plants and replants them the following spring.
Randy has fashioned elderberry trees to produce a tunnel effect. He also has a shade garden.
Visitors to the garden also will see asparagus, castor bean plants and spruce trees.
Twice a day, Randy and Barb enjoy smoothies. Those drinks are made with many fruits and vegetables they grow themselves, such as pears, apples, Swiss chard, carrots, kale, elderberries and chokecherries.
Barb helps Randy mow the lawn. She also has her own flower bed. Most of the flowers in the bed she grew from seed. She’s particularly fond of yellow begonias and dahlias.
She likes to sit down on one of the benches to appreciate the beauty and to think.
Randy especially likes working on the garden in the evening. “It’s just a peaceful time,” he says.
He grew fond of trees when he was a kid. Land on the family farm adjoined the Wood River. As a youngster, he built tree houses and played in the trees.
Over time, though, he’s become more fond of flowers.
“I always enjoyed the beauty of flowers,” he said. But he never got into them the way he has the last six, seven or eight years. His favorite flower is a red rose.
For two winters when he was working at Riverside, he studied horticulture at Central Community College in Hastings.
Before that, he graduated from Northwest High School. Barb is a Wood River graduate.
They have been married for 46 years. Barb, 63, worked at Maurice’s in Conestoga Mall for 32 years, and then five or six years at the American Red Cross.
The couple has three children and six grandchildren. One of their kids, Dusty, is superintendent of Hall County Park. When the Kennys bought the property 30 years ago, it had six to eight trees. Now there are more than 100. Randy planted 25 fruit trees, some of which have died.
Forty years ago, Randy was going to take over Swanson Nursery. But the 1980 tornadoes did a lot of damage to the nursery, which wrecked that dream.
Still, the flower garden has reminders of Swanson Nursery.
Swanson, who died in 2017 at the age of 95, gave him three statues, flowerpots, bushes, a birdbath and a cement bench.
Randy spends a lot of time thinking about what he’s going to do next. He might approach his wife and say, “I’ve thought of another flower bed I can build.”
Winter is a good time to trim trees and bushes. He learned that at the golf course.
Randy keeps busy. Last winter, he built 24 trellises in his shop.
Barb’s aunt, Sylvia McTavish, thinks Randy is an artist with a green thumb.
“She thinks if I put a stick in the ground, it’ll grow,” he says.
The Kennys don’t mind having people visit. It’s rewarding, he said, to see people appreciate his landscaping.
The Kennys like the birds the garden attracts. They’re especially fond of wrens, which they say are feisty and territorial.
He finds working with the plants relaxing. “I just love doing it. I really do,” says Randy, who feels blessed that he beat cancer.
He seems to be in great shape.
“It’s the smoothies,” he says, smiling.
August 18, 2020 at 09:51AM
https://theindependent.com/news/local/eye-catching-flower-garden-is-cairo-couple-s-creation/article_a936c26a-e0fd-11ea-b365-7790a01e82e1.html
Eye-catching flower garden is Cairo couple’s creation - Grand Island Independent
https://news.google.com/search?q=Flower&hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US:en
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