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Terrence Williams maneuvers his truck slowly
along Towerview Drive, heading toward Duke University Road. In the
back of the truck, 550 gallons of water slosh back and forth in a
drum. He passes Rubenstein Hall, the Wilson Center, and the Wannamaker
dorms. As he pulls around the traffic circle at the head of the blue
zone parking lots, Wade Tilley, in the passenger seat, looks out
the window at the circular bed of flowers in the middle of the circle.
It's bursting with pansies: purple, white, yellow.
"All that got to be pulled up," Tilley says, matter-of-factly.
Pansies are "winter flowers," he says. "It gets too
hot, they gone."
"They get fried up," Williams says, nodding. "They
love the snow. Snow sits on top of them. Once that snow melts, they
look even prettier."
Now, there's no snow, and little chance of it for the rest of the
year. It's early May, just after Reunions Weekend. Williams and Tilley,
as members of the facilities and maintenance department's Accent
Team, are charged with caring for all of the university's annual
beds. At this time of year, that means pulling up the winter flowers--pansies,
tulips--and planting summer ones--petunias, begonias, marigolds,
angelonia, purple heart--in their place in time for the campus to
present a fresh face for graduation weekend.
The team consists of six members: Wade Tilley, Williams, Rhonda Goolsby,
Ramona McAdams, Herbert Williams, and their leader, horticultural
specialist Jenny Gordon. On any given day, team members group together
in twos or threes to handle a specific task: watering, weeding, pulling
up old plants, planting new ones.
On this particular morning, Tilley and Williams have been sent out
to water some recently planted beds. This task is particularly important,
Williams notes, because the plants have yet to take root, and drying
out could kill them.
Williams, twenty-nine, grew up in Durham and worked as a floor technician,
as well as at Subway, until five years ago when his uncle Herbert,
also a member of the Accent Team, keyed him into the job opening.
He's been with the team ever since. He says he enjoys the solitude
that the job allows. "I guess you got to 'make it their way'
at Subway," he says, adding with a grin, "I like to make
it my way."
Tilley, seventy-five, has worked at Duke for the last fifteen years,
and though previous jobs included building houses, making sheets
in a cotton mill, and working on machines in a tobacco factory, he
has always been involved in landscaping on the side. Tilley has already
retired from Duke twice, but keeps being enticed back. This time,
he came back under contract to help train new employees. "You
get to be seventy-five, it's about time to quit," he says. "It
won't be long." But given the smile on his face, and his nimbleness
in the flower beds, you get the feeling it might, in fact, be longer,
rather than shorter. He enjoys chatting, and imparts nuggets of wisdom
like, "the good Lord ought to have made all landscapers with
rubber backs."
Williams pulls the truck up to the flagpole outside Wallace Wade
Stadium. The bed that surrounds it is full of red begonias, planted
just last week. Tilley shoves his hand through a layer of woodchips--which
they call "bark"--and into the soil underneath, feeling
for moisture. He and Williams turn on their hoses and focus the spray
on the flowers for about a minute. Tilley reaches into the soil once
more. He pulls out a handful and, after deciding that the texture
is just right, nods to Williams. They cut off the hoses and reel
them in. They hop back in the truck and move on to the next bed,
in front of the Knight House on Pinecrest Road.
Before lunch, Terry Sterling, one of three growers that FMD contracts
with for flowers, arrives on campus with a load of new plants. Though
Sterling's Raleigh operation is somewhat smaller than that of the
other growers, Gordon says she is often more reliable. If the team
is getting down to the end of the season and still missing plants,
it is Sterling they go to for a quick fix. Tilley and Williams show
up just as the other team members are finishing unloading her van.
After the team carries the last round of plants into the holding
area, the two hop back in the truck to water a few more beds before
an afternoon of planting. On the way, they stop to refill the water
drum. It only takes six or seven minutes to fill, through a two-inch
hose, and "if you hustle," Williams says, "you can
empty it in forty-some minutes."
After lunch, the team returns to the holding area to greet a delivery
truck from a second grower, Franklin Brothers. Gordon carefully consults
the packing list as the driver unloads the plants, handing them off
to Accent Team members.
The trays come off the truck dripping wet and cool. As each new type
comes off, they start a new row of flats in the holding pen. The
team lines up to grab trays. Some carry one, some two, back and forth
from the truck to the line of trays growing neatly.
They unload marigolds, yellow and mixed; petunias, white, blue, and "flag
mix"; and angelonia, pink, white, and blue--"for outside
Davison," Gordon says.
"There's your edging at Fuqua," she tells McAdams as they
unload trays of yellow marigolds off the truck. "That's for
Physics," she adds, pointing to another tray.
Gordon wears work boots, khakis, and a dark-blue polo shirt. She
mostly keeps her graying hair pulled back in a pony tail. She first
moved to North Carolina in 1985 and owned her own landscaping business
before coming to Duke in 1997. She does much of the planning for
the beds, though she often consults with the other team members and,
when necessary, makes changes on the fly based on what flowers are
available and where they are needed.
There is a science to arranging flower beds. With perennial beds,
you carefully arrange a mixture of plants so that the bed will bloom
in stages throughout the year, says Goolsby, who has taken some graduate
courses in horticulture and plans to earn a degree in landscape design.
But with the annual beds, the idea is a fuller, more colorful, impact.
"With the drive-by beds, we've only got a few seconds to catch
you," Gordon says. "They have to be bright and bold. If
you're in a walking area, you need to layer up the details--for instance,
the pansies should have faces--because you have more time to take
in the details." Sometimes, she tries to shake things up, using
plants in atypical ways. Last year, for example, they planted hot
peppers in several beds.
In three trucks, the team heads for the traffic circle at the intersection
of Chapel and Campus drives. The center of the circle is lush with
thick, green grass. It's a sunny day, and the temperature is mild.
Just a few days ago the rim of the circle was exploding with purple,
yellow, and white pansies and pink tulips. Those have now been removed
and replaced with three rows of red wax begonias and fresh bark.
The plan is to plant an outer row of petunias now and follow up with
an inner row of blue salvia in a few weeks when the plants arrive
from the grower.
They park their trucks on the outside of the circle. Team members
hop out and don reflective vests. Tilley and Terrence Williams start
off at one point on the circle, each holding a tray of petunias.
Tilley heads left, and Williams right, laying out plants at eight-inch
intervals as they go. When they run out of plants, they drop the
empty tray and head back to the truck for a new one. Herbert Williams
starts off in the middle. He grabs a plant, squeezes the plastic
casing gently and eases the plant out, stabs the ground with a trowel,
and deposits the root system into the hole that opens up to the blade.
He tosses the plastic casing behind him, into the street, and quickly
taps dirt and bark down around the plant. He grabs the next plant.
Campus buses pass slowly and carefully (perhaps more carefully than
they will later--as Terrence Williams said on the drive over, "Soon
as we plant these petunias, somebody's probably going to run over
them.") As the minutes pass, empty flats stack up, and small
plastic containers blow across the street in the breeze.
When Terrence Williams and Tilley finish laying out the plants, they
grab trowels and start planting. Goolsby and McAdams, too. The work
gets done fast.
In the past, the team was feverishly planting up to the last minute
to finish all of the major beds--those on the main quad and near
the entrances and athletic facilities--before visitors began streaming
in for the big weekend.
But, this year, lunchtime on the Friday of graduation weekend finds
them sitting around the break-room table in their Central Campus
headquarters trailer, eating barbeque chicken out of Styrofoam containers
and watching the news on a television in the corner. The pace of
the meal is leisurely considering that they have only a few hours
before moms and dads, grandmas and grandpas, aunts and uncles and
cousins begin arriving. They're not worried. As Gordon explains,
this year the team already met its goal--on Tuesday.
--Jacob Dagger |
