Arrow-right Camera
The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Gardening with Grandma


Jan Kroll and her grandson Logan, 4, relax outside her potting shed.
 (Brian Plonka/The Spokesman-REview / The Spokesman-Review)
Jill Barville Correspondent

One of the best perks of retirement is having the time to spend with grandchildren.

Jan Kroll is taking advantage of that opportunity. She especially loves gardening with 4-year-old Logan, who often comes to spend the night.

“Gardening is one of my passions,” Kroll says, so it was natural to have Logan garden with her, digging in the dirt, raking, planting bulbs and flowers and pulling weeds.

Gardening “gives us a chance to really talk,” she says. “I prize those times. He is so much fun.”

Logan especially likes to learn the names of the plants, and she laughs as she recounts the time he came to visit, about a week after helping her plant an alstroemeria, a lilylike plant with showy flowers. He looked at the plant and said with pride, “Oh, Nana, your alstrameria is looking really good.”

Putting on his gardening gloves and orange gardening hat, Logan gets out his own child-sized tools and follows Kroll through the yard, helping however he can.

“Logan loves to garden and is a big help,” she says. “He pulls weeds. He plants bulbs and digs. He fetches things.”

But with gardening tools scattered between a shed and the garage, fetching wasn’t very convenient.

So Jan suggested to her husband, Richard, that it would be nice to have one convenient place for all her gardening tools, perhaps even a structure that matched the house.

Richard worked for several months designing and building, finishing the potting shed this summer for his wife and grandson.

“Logan was so cute,” she says. “Every day he would call to see how Papa was doing.”

The shed, which they renamed “Nana’s Summer Cottage” after tallying up expenses, sits at an angle in the front corner of the yard facing the house. Like a miniature guest house, it matches their home, from its buttery yellow siding and white scalloped trim to the green shutters on the windows.

It even has a cupola on the roof, a perfect fit for the rolling farmland within view of their 10 acres. They can enjoy the view together, sitting in the adult- and child-sized plastic chairs under the cottage’s small overhang on a porch of patio pavers. Or, as often happens, Kroll can sit and watch Logan playing in the yard, chasing butterflies or hiding under his favorite tree, a small weeping birch with branches that touch the ground.

If Logan wants to play in the cottage, he has a yellow tub of toys and three child-sized chairs from an old school. The chairs are painted the same gray as the floor with the grandchildren’s handprints in white on the backs. On the wall hang more handprints; these made by Kroll’s children when they were a just little bit bigger than Logan. And in one window the bird sun catcher Logan gave Nana for Mother’s Day reflects the light.

Of course the cottage also holds adult-sized and brightly colored child-sized gardening tools. After an afternoon spent gardening with his Nana, Logan always hangs his carefully back on their hooks on the white pegboard walls.

A wood plaque hangs on its wall of the inviting cottage and reads, “A gardener lives here with her well tended family.”

It is no wonder Logan loves gardening with Kroll. As he helps water and weed, nurturing the colorful petunias and peonies, she is nurturing him, watering and fertilizing with unconditional love and undivided attention.

“They change so fast,” she says. “I want to take advantage of these years.”