Hub and Spokes. Audio Collective.

This is Rumbel Strip by America Heilman.

And the last years of my parents, I would come home with tons of free plants and the driveway was just all

potted plants all the way down the driveway ready to be waiting to be planted

my father said asked me one day, do you need so many? No, there's no such

thing as too many plants. A few months ago a listener called Victor wrote to me and he said he'd met an extraordinary

man in a tea house that used to be a chicken coop deep inside an elaborate

garden which runs down to a stream. Victor was looking at the house which is for sale and he had wandered

into the garden and found himself in a wild place,

full of secret paths and boulevards, and rare plants and trees, native and exotic.

Armand Patoine was sitting in the tea house dividing bulbs and offered to give Victor a tour.

Armand's family is Kibiqua and Armand grew up in this house and he has been making this garden for 49 years. When I went to visit him

we sat in the tea house and drank coffee. We talked about gardening and what God has to do

with gardening which it turns out is everything.

It's funny, one of my strongest memories from childhood is finding my mother digging in

her garden and talking to her plants, which I didn't understand at the time, but now I do. I'm not a very good gardener. I don't

understand design. But I love my plants, and I love to think about the dirt under my plants.

At the end of a long winter, I start dreaming about my plants.

And sometimes I just look at a single plant or a tree

for a really long time. And I get something or I hear something I don't know what it is

but I think Armand does here's Armand Petuan.

I was born here and since age 8 I started doing landscaping.

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