Glad garden growing

BY SARA KEDDY

Kings County Register

It’s fitting the pink glads are bursting forth first.

The colour of the breast cancer cure campaign, it makes Marg’s Glad Garden’s purpose in Grafton immediately recognizable - and beautiful. “They’ve been coming on for a week,” says gardener Murray Salsman. “I’ve taken out two truckloads of them.”

Blooms in burgundy, yellow, white, blue, variegated and any other colour imaginable are set in rows - 10,000 bulbs planted in the garden’s fourth season.

Last year, the garden raised $12,000 for the Marg Salsman Cancer Care Patient Navigator Memorial Fund. “We’ve collected over $24,000 since we stared, and we’ve spent over $22,000,” says Salsman.

The fund helps Valley people and their families cope with the other effects of a cancer diagnosis: the loss of income that pays the rent or mortgage, other bills and even drug costs; overnight stays and travel to treatments and specialists’ appointments, home adjustments - hospital bed rentals, for example. “We’ve helped a young fellow in Kentville pay for drugs, and we got a nice email from his mother, thanking us,” Salsman says. “Something like that means more to us than anything. “I find it hard to hear people come in and talk about how great it is - it burns me we have to be raising money for people to survive, that they have to depend on a charity.”

Still, the garden - and the project - have growing support. The fund is a registered charity, and more people are being referred to it as a source of help in a time of need. Salsman says he’s also hearing from people discovering the work for the first time. “I have an accountant now making a donation instead of sending out gifts, and there are families making memorial donations.’

Signs in the garden with people’s names on them are memorials themselves. “They all have a story,” he says, pointing in particular to three bearing the same name. “She was a lady down from Annapolis, and they had a little do for her. They raised $350 to have three heart-shaped signs in the garden.”

Another sign is for Salsman’s sister - “they’re all people who have died of cancer. “It’s interesting to talk to cancer survivors, their families - they know what it’s like to go through this. Cancer touches everyone.”

Marg’s Glad Garden will be in full bloom from now until the end of August, and the gardens are open from noon to dusk each day. Salsman already has two weddings getting flowers from the garden, and he’ll cut one bloom or dozens for others who come visit and make a donation to Marg’s fund. Follow the pink, heart-shaped sings from Highway 101 Exit 15, Berwick, or along Brooklyn Street through Waterville and Grafton.

Weblink: gladofhope.ca