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UL - In retired elementary teacher Glenda Balliviero’s small world beside busy Johnston Street, it’s not THE sun but “Mr. Sun.”
She calls the arrangement between the LSU AgCenter and the University of Louisiana at Lafayette that makes a children’s garden possible “nice.”
The children’s garden at the (University of Louisiana ) Ira Nelson Horticulture Center is among the demonstration gardens tended by Master Gardeners, men and women who study applied gardening through the LSU AgCenter’s extension program.
Entrance to the children’s garden is in the 2200 block of Johnston Street, across from Our Lady of Fatima Catholic Church. The garden is open 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. daily.
<center><p><a href="http://www.2theadvocate.com/features/17120591.html?showAll=y&c=y" target="_blank">The rest of the story</a>
By ED CULLEN
Advocate staff writer
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“She’s a pleasure to be around,” said Peggy Simon, a Master Gardener since 2005.
Simon met Glenda and Norman Balliviero one day before class. The Ballivieros are from Plaquemines Parish. Glenda’s dad had a citrus orchard.
“It was strange,” said Simon, who used to sell oranges grown in Plaquemines Parish. “I’d leave early to drive from Kaplan to Lafayette to take the Master Gardener class. I was talking to Glenda and told her I was from Port Sulphur. She’s from Boothville.”
Norman Balliviero’s transfer to Lafayette Parish by Chevron Corp. is why the couple lives on four acres at Butcher Switch Road, a 15-minute drive from the garden.
Balliviero spends six or seven hours a day in her home garden along with 15-20 hours a week at the children’s garden in the spring. She told her husband if she was going to live in Lafayette there had to be acreage involved.
“I’m country,” she said. “I don’t like one house next to the other.”
The Ballivieros left Boothville in 1969 for Belle Chasse after Hurricane Camille. They left Belle Chasse in 1989 for Lafayette when Chevron transferred Norman to Lafayette.
“It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” Glenda said.
In 1994, Glenda, then 48, began making the 300-mile roundtrip to Belle Chasse every Friday to volunteer at her granddaughter’s school. She made the commute for nine years.
“We were both involved in the schools,” Glenda said. “Norman was on the Plaquemines Parish School Board.”
Glenda missed home but came to terms with it. She decided that she didn’t have to miss teaching or being around children.
The Ballivieros were in Denyse Cummins’ Master Gardener class in Lafayette. Cummins is now an LSU AgCenter horticulturist in northwest Louisiana.
“I thought their ideas were good and original,” Cummins said. “The participation, the number of children” who visit the garden, “is phenomenal.”
More than 2,500 children have attended classes at the children’s garden since the spring of 2004. LSU AgCenter horticulture agent Stuart Gauthier inherited the Ballivieros’ plans for a children’s garden when Cummins headed north.
The children’s garden is what Master Gardeners are supposed to do — train gardeners who, then, train or educate others, Gauthier said.
“We wouldn’t have a children’s garden without Norman,” Glenda said. “He takes the children through the garden. I do the educational part.”
Glenda plants and weeds. Norman cuts the Master Gardeners’ half-acre compound.
In early spring, when the first classes of children arrive, the plant identification signs in the garden are bigger than many of the plants.
“This is a micro-managed garden,” Simon said. “We plant a lot of plants and have to keep them cut back to show the other plants.”
The teaching garden offers tutelage to adults as well as children. That mental block you have for the name of that plant, you know, the one that looks like what-a-you-call it?
“Hummingbird plant,” the sign says. Also called “King’s Crown.” Botanical name: “Dicliptera suberecta.”
“I tell children the botanical name is like the name on their birth certificates,” Glenda Balliviero said. “No matter where in the world they go, that’s how they’re known. Common names are like nicknames, what plants are called in a certain locale. Like ‘rooster comb’ is celosia.”
In the garden’s pioneer plants, you find luffa gourds, cotton, sugarcane, peanuts (a legume) and egg gourd.
The egg gourds are the size of chicken eggs and can be mistaken for what hens lay. Visitors or someone “collect” the egg gourds nestled beside ceramic chickens.
“I’m down to just that one,” Balliviero said, “but I’ve got some more at home.”
Gardeners leave a little of themselves in their plantings. That explains the ankle cast in the children’s garden.
Simon did yeoman’s service in the garden, Glenda Balliviero said, during Balliviero’s knee, shoulder, back and ankle surgeries over the last five years.
“All I did was clean up,” Simon said. “All the credit goes to Glenda and Norman. You say children’s garden and it seems like an easy task, but there’s a lot of planning work. If you garden, you know what I mean.”
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