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Garden Club of Wiscasset Healing Gardens

Bath & Wiscasset, Maine

In the summer of 2006, while undergoing radiation treatments for breast cancer at Bath's Coastal Cancer Center, Esther Leck would look out over the grounds and envision gardens in place of the bland lawn.

"I am a gardener; my parents and grandparents were both gardeners," Leck said. 'It's really a way for me to heal.'

For someone so accustomed to gardens, the lack of flowers at the center, the place where healing was most critical, was a sore absence ' and not just for her.

'While I was having my therapy, I saw a lot of hot people waiting for people or for their appointments, looking for shade,' Leck said.

Although there was a 'tranquil' natural pond out back, thick with water lilies, it was hard to access and invisible from the front of the building. Hatching a plot, Leck teamed up with an enthusiastic nurse oncologist and the Maine Medical Center, which runs the treatment center, to realize her idea.

The hospital in 2007 donated $2,500 for bulbs for its campuses in Portland, Scarborough -- and Bath. There, Leck, with members of the local garden club, planted not just a pink tulip garden but also a pink perennial garden, which is festooned with a combination of pink lilies, daffodils and tulips.

A landscaper hired by the center also leveled the steeply sloping hill to the pond and built a rock wall and stone terrace on the knoll above it. Now visitors can sit on a bench underneath some evergreens, gazing over the pond while being cooled by a breeze.

But Leck didn't stop there. Last fall, she worked with her Wiscasset gardening club to plant a pink tulip garden on a municipal site in Wiscasset. She says at least a third of the 100 or so club members have been affected by cancer. And two of the women who helped plant the pink gardens in Bath have since died: Kay Lieser and Christie Snowe.

    

'It's now a garden of healing and hope -- and of memory,' Leck says.

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