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Published: 8/4/2012 | Updated: 6/17/2013
On the side of her hill, Ruth Harding always planted flowers in the shape of a butterfly. If you've driven along 30th Street across from Baldwin Intermediate School, you've seen her colorful display. It's on the west side, and Harding always took great pleasure of her garden. Harding has lived in the house with the sprawling yard for 35 yards. She's a master gardener and loves to be outside. For years, Baldwin students would come over with teachers to admire the display. She'd get honks and waves when she was working outside on the large hill area. But the last few years have been tough for Harding, 85. She had a heart attack and other medical woes, and she can't go outside much anymore. In fact, she can't even walk over to the hill. So the hill didn't have flowers last year, and people wondered why the normally colorful hill looked so forlorn. "I have these stupid health issues," Harding says in a strong voice, sitting at her kitchen table. "I just couldn't do it, plant the flowers. "And then Janet called me." Harding is referring to Janet Tieken, who lives across the street. Tieken has long admired the flowers on the hill and was dismayed when the "Butterfly Woman" didn't put her flowers on display last summer. "So I told her I'd do it," Tieken says. For Harding, this is a big deal. She still tinkers in her backyard with plants and vegetables, but especially with the hot weather lately, it's all she can do to sit on her patio. "I did all my own yard work, and I loved to be outside," Harding says. "That's my whole thing, the outdoors." Last Memorial Day weekend, Tieken went across the street with a bunch of begonias and mulch. It was a hot Saturday, so Janet started working a little later in the day. It took about 16 hours, and she wasn't finished until dawn nearly broke on Sunday, but the hill was restored with bright red flowers inside the butterfly-shaped garden edging. "I wore a long sleeved shirt. I looked like a mud person when I was done," Tieken says with a laugh. Tieken shrugs off the good deed, sayings she loves her neighbor and seeing her happy with the display was more than enough of a reward. She told Harding to call her friends and tell them the butterfly garden was back, and she's keept an eye on the automatic sprinklers so the flowers are maintained during a brutally hot and dry summer. Tieken even took photos of the garden and blew one of them up so Harding could see her handiwork, since she can no longer walk that far out of the house or on the hill. "It's been around for a long time," Tieken says. "It just makes us so happy to have that butterfly back." Neighborhoods today are about fences and closed doors, and many times we don't even know the people living across the street. It's refreshing to hear about a gal helping her neighbor out, for all the right reasons. Harding sure appreciates it. "Janet is a godsend," Harding says. "To think that she would go to all that work is just beyond my comprehension." -- rhart@whig.com/221-3370
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