Goodbye Ol' Peeps

Ol' Peeps has often gone to the private places of his life to entertain and enlighten the readers of this journal but this is his last perambulation through memory, a lamentable occurrence that has become a necessity beyond his control.

He has also come to mourn the closing of our Arlington greenhouse after 24 years, and to celebrate its consolidation with our spacious Chantilly gardens. He hopes you will all embrace the move and share our excitement.

Our small farm has two large heated greenhouses and is near Dulles Airport, only 30 minutes from Arlington. It is nearly 5 acres, providing us with many advantages over our cramped former quarters in Arlington. We know you will all recognize the value of the large parking lot, and our ability to offer you a larger array of home-grown herb, vegetable, and ornamental plants. This new location provides us an opportunity to bring you expert speakers, both local and national, to provide information to make your gardening easier and more successful.

This new location has also brought to fruition a long-time dream of Ol' Peeps, a chance to organize a lavender festival; we hope it will become reality next June. It will be the first of many such free special events where you can learn more about your favorite herb, vegetable, and ornamental plants.

For many years, you and I have listened to each other and gained from the conversation. It was not just friendly banter and it made herb and vegetable gardens flourish. In the process we became friends, and it is as a friend that Ol' Peeps appears now to acknowledge the wonder of this relationship that began for some of you a quarter century ago.

From the first Saturday we sold plants from a front yard card table our goal has been to offer the highest quality and the largest selection of varieties. From the beginning we were different. Unlike many large nurseries, we grew the plants we sold. We never hesitated to discard plants that didn't meet our high standards and we developed new ways to assure quality and value such as our method of clump transplanting where more than one seedling is dibbled into the pot, producing larger, stronger, and more productive plants. Along the way we developed many new herb varieties and we continue to play with the gene pool at our nursery, and around the U.S., for new herbs to brighten your gardens.

The concepts that have guided us from the beginning have been old fashioned garden homilies remembered from childhood, and it was worth preserving them 25 years ago and it is worth keeping them today. I noticed early that this approach created a deep and complex relationship between buyer and seller, and it could be very personal. We got used to that and liked it very much, and we became friends with you in spite of the fact money was involved.

Before long Ol' Peeps got into the act. The stylized moniker that characterized him came from a column written for a little weekly paper in Delaware. The name "Peeps" was used to emphasize the disreputable wink, the Ol' boy had. Visually Peeps was the least inviting gent imaginable, even a bit evil, but the absurd winking head made the Ol' Boy laugh. We needed Peeps desperately that spring to help fill an empty place in the catalog that looked embarrassing without words because we had no more garden talk. After his introduction, he quickly became a quirky centerpiece of the catalog.

Our relationship with you prospered and more greenhouses popped up in our back yard and then, with a nudge from the county, we decided to consolidate everything into one building. It was a single, bright greenhouse with plenty of room and it covered most of our backyard. It was a place in which nothing was hidden; the finished plants for sale were on one side of the building and the growing plants were on the other. It fit our idea of openness and trust perfectly.

Everything went along well until one day last spring when an accumulation of small events rang a bell and I told my family doctor that I was having trouble identifying by name and characteristics some of the plants I had known intimately for many years. My memory loss had begun in a small way, I realized in hindsight, at least a year earlier, and it was complicating my life to say the least.

Joyce and I thought the culprit might be stress and worry and the long, hard, never-ending hours it took to grow and sell our plants. This is a job I love too much, but it is an occupation that has fear built into it, something few gardeners understand until their livelihood depends on the unpredictability of nature. Weather is the god to whom a nurseryman must pay obeisance, and it is a fickle deity. I have lived through times when a single night destroyed the work of 12 months because I relied on a faulty but favorable weather forecast and sought relief from another 3 hours work that would have pushed me past midnight.

During a routine physical, I told my family doctor of my memory loss. He immediately referred me to a specialist at Georgetown Hospital. I met with him in early March and a schedule of tests began. The testing was slow but it was finished the end of May. I was told I had Alzheimer's, a destructive neurological disease with no cure.

It appears I was unlucky enough to have received tainted genes that set me up to come down with a rare, fast-acting type of Alzheimer's, a disease that begins by robbing you of memory and then proceeds to hurry you toward a helpless, bumbling, speechless death. The type of Alzheimer's I have is rare, striking patients between 30 and 60; I am 57. The tests indicated I had severely impaired short-term memory and poor episodic memory. It was a pattern, the report of the neuropsychological evaluation concluded, that was "entirely consistent with early stage Alzheimer's Dementia."

Although the disease has been known for nearly a 100 years, it secrets have been revealed slowly and only recently. Not enough is known today of Alzheimer's to stop or satisfactorily control its evil destruction of the brain. Fortunately, the horizon is bright with possibilities to control and even reverse the disease.

I am thankful that I have a job that requires memory and customers who depend on my use of it to help them. Without your barrage of questions, I would not have realized my memory was impaired and I would not have sought professional help to diagnose the problem.

In the meantime, along with growing plants for Christmas and spring, I have begun writing a book about my experiences with Alzheimer's and memory. In addition, I am putting the finishing touches on a book written with Art Tucker, one of the world's first rate experts on herbs. The Big Herb Book, as we have referred to it, has been a 10-year labor of love to write, and is a detailed compendium of information about growing herbs and covers a wide array of species. Interweave Press, the publisher of my last two books, is bringing it out, and it is expected to run to about 800 pages; availability is likely to be late in the year 2000. Of course we will have signed copies of the book available for you either at the nursery or by mail as soon as they are available. Further details will be in the spring catalog.

I had hoped to follow my grandmother DeBaggio's life path and I wanted to beat her 104 years, but now, without the intervention of a medical miracle to reverse the destructive path of Alzheimer's, it is more likely that I will follow my parents and repeat their early deaths.

There are few things in life as tasty as basil, as worthwhile to have in the garden as rosemary, and as sweet as the aroma of lavender, but even they need to be renewed periodically and it is that process on which Francesco, Joyce, and the men and women who work with us have now embarked. Although I must bow out in time, I intend to hang around as long as I can and work as hard as I ever have to grow the finest plants possible. I may not be as visible in the greenhouse in the days to come but I will be there in person frequently and in spirit forever.

You have been a large part of my life and when I was not producing plants for you, I was thinking about you. You have been my life line for the last 25 years. I am going to miss you.

The Ol' Boy never thought he would have to write words so personal and sad that they opened the secret places in his heart and it made his eyes fill with tears as he wrote his final words. This is not the end but the beginning of a new adventure, different from all others, uncharted, mysterious, and frightening. It is a journey we all take some time in our life, and it is the final thing we do.

--Tom DeBaggio