Garden comforts officer's widow

YADKINVILLE -- Her husband gave her the hydrangea bush and the Japanese maple.

Her mother-in-law gave the couple the weeping cherry when they moved in years ago. Peonies were started from bushes that came from her, too. For birthdays, they make pudding from persimmons that they harvested from a tree near the driveway.

In Beth Hutchens' family, plants have always meant something. They're passed down like old silver and handmade quilts.

"We have a high regard for plants," Hutchens said. "These are the kind of things you can keep forever. You can remember."

Hutchens has a lot to remember. She is the widow of Sgt. Mickey Hutchens, a Winston-Salem police officer who was shot to death in October while responding to a domestic dispute at a Bojangles' restaurant.

When Sgt. Howard Plouff, a Winston-Salem police officer, was killed on the job in 2007, Doug Owen built a small memorial garden for his family. When he heard about Mickey Hutchens' death, he contacted Beth through the police department and made a similar offer.

She called back a couple of weeks later, Owen said.

"She showed me the things that Mickey had put into the ground, and she said she'd like to incorporate these things."

"I find that doing volunteer work is the most rewarding work I do," he said. "I can't imagine what it would be like to lose a spouse in that violent way. If I can make a person's life a little easier in their time of trouble, then that's what I can do - and that's how I can help.

"If you take that all sorrow, anguish and pain, and you put in something tangible like flowers, it kind of masks the pain you're going through."

A helping hand

Owen owns Majestic Gardens, a Winston-Salem landscape-design business. He's one of the organizers of Operation Christmas Tree, a service that gathers up unsold Christmas trees every year and gives them to families who can't afford them.

Owen convinced Tim Hanauer of Earth Graphics and Alan Koontz of Carolina Pondscapes, an aquatic landscaping business based in Thomasville, to help him. Owen estimates they've donated about $10,000 in materials and labor.

The Hutchens built their modest one-story house 15 years ago when they moved from Clemmons. It's back from old Highway 421, on rolling county land hugged by the yards of her extended family. Mickey's mother and stepfather live within sight. So does Mickey's aunt.

Gradually, they added landscaping. They didn't have money to do a lot - they had two daughters to put through college - but they liked being outside.

"We were doing a little bit at a time. This would be so important to Mickey if he was here," Hutchens said.

Without her husband, Hutchens does some of the yard work Mickey used to. She mows their wide, long lawn, listening to books that she has downloaded to her iPod.

A few weeks ago, Owen and Koontz came by Hutchens' house to start the garden.

Koontz drove back and forth across the Hutchens' front yard, pushing Tennessee mountain boulders into position over a hole dug deep into North Carolina Piedmont red clay.

The garden's focus is a water feature: Water bubbles over a carefully arranged pile of boulders, spreading down over pebbles and smaller rocks and filling the Hutchens' quiet yard with a gentle gurgle.

There are new perennials - day lilies, Russian sage, hellebore, a Camilla bush.

Work to be done

After Hutchens has a new garage built, volunteers will come back and build a walkway around the front of the house, tying all the landscaping together.

"Everybody can see it," Owen said. "It's not just a garden for them. It's for her community of family to enjoy. It's an opportunity to put your love for someone into something physical."

A week and a half later, Hutchens invited her family over for a Sunday meal and a planting session.

They planted marigolds. They planted verbena. They planted snapdragons, dahlias and other annuals.

When it gets cool again, Hutchens plans to transplant other plants, maybe harvesting some from her mother-in-law's lush beds - hostas, irises and peonies. She wants to set a bench in the garden and a statute of an angel for Mickey.

"It's really just getting started," she said. "I know he would have loved it."