Temple Of Bloom Master Gardeners Losing Their Guiding Light With Retirement Of Sydney Mccrea

“Good morning. This is the Master Gardener Clinic. How can I help you?”

The familiar voice on the phone is Sydney McCrea’s.

For 18 years, Master Gardener and Plant Clinic Specialist Sydney McCrea and a team of Master Gardeners have diagnosed our plant problems, provided us with information on everything that creeps, crawls and grows and made sure that WSU Master Gardeners became household words.

The last gardening season of the century is over and McCrea is retiring from her post at the Spokane County WSU Cooperative Extension. She plans to “pursue other hobbies outside of gardening.”

Or so she says. Friends of hers know there isn’t a tree McCrea passes that she doesn’t scrutinize or a nursery she doesn’t visit. Once the soil gets under your fingernails, it’s there to stay.

I met Sydney in 1982 when she was working as a horticulture assistant at the Spokane County Extension office. I had just finished the Master Gardener training program. My first day on the job was spent working with her in the Plant Clinic. Phones were ringing off the hook with gardeners wanting to know everything from how to cure fairy rings to how to control apple maggots. Sydney just sat there rattling off information. I was in awe. I decided right then that when I grew up, I wanted to be like Syd.

The next year, Sydney became the Master Gardener Coordinator and I took over as the horticulture assistant. We spent many hours dissecting plants and searching for answers to seemingly unsolvable plant problems. Back then, the Master Gardener Plant Clinics were held in area libraries and staffed by a couple of Master Gardeners. The main clinic was a small room at the Extension office, with a few resource books and a microscope.

Today, the Plant Clinic is housed exclusively at the Extension office in a large room with hundreds of resource books, computers, microscopes, pinned insects, pressed examples of diseased plants and a staff of Master Gardeners.

“Though Sydney could solve many of the plant problems,” says Master Gardener Milo Ball, “she would refer the Master Gardeners to a specific book or manual. This mentoring helped us as Master Gardeners to assist clients and to grow in knowledge which made working in the Plant Clinic a great experience.”

“I have worked 15 years with Sydney,” says Extension Agent Tonie Fitzgerald. “It never ceases to amaze me that she knows so much, does so much and is always cooking up projects for the Master Gardeners to do. She made the Spokane County volunteer program one of the best in the state. A lot of other counties are using ours as a model for their programs.”

Many area gardeners have used the Master Gardener speakers list, attended the Yard and Garden Lecture Series, enjoyed guided tours of Manito Park and gleaned gardening information from Master Gardener demonstrations at fairs, home shows, and any event that remotely smells of gardening. McCrea had her hand in all of these.

In addition, McCrea produces reams of articles and publications. Many publications available at the County Extension office are her work or work on which she collaborated with others.

Her fact sheet on rock gardens drew praise from the president of the National Rock Gardeners Association and the information was put on the WSU educational Web site - gardener.WSU.edu/eastside.

Although Sydney is a gardening guru, she’s just as whacky as the rest of us gardeners when it comes to her own yard.

Since 1982, her small garden has gone through complete metamorphosis at least four times - each version more glorious. Of course McCrea doesn’t toil alone; it’s taken 52 years for her to convince her husband Floyd of the joys of gardening.

The early garden consisted of a small area of lawn in the back yard, surrounded by exquisite Japanese maples, viburnums, cascading rock garden plants and their neighbors’ trees.

The roots of the neighboring trees and a few of their own forced them into phase two. Suddenly McCrea became an expert on the challenges of tree roots in a small garden. Small trees and shrubs began loosing the battle for space and water to larger trees and McCrea became an expert on container gardening. She filled pots with hosta and other choice specimens and tucked them among the tree roots. The lawn shrank and raised berms were developed. Exquisite miniature conifers and shallow-rooted rock garden plants became features in her garden.

Still, the large tree roots continued to spread through the garden, destroying what little lawn was left. The McCreas replaced the stressed and tattered lawn with a multi-level wooden deck connected to the covered patio. Today the deck is surrounded by saxifrage, miniature conifers, baskets of geraniums, impatiens, hostas, groomed shrubs and specimen trees.

It’s a garden for all seasons and it’s a tribute to the gardener. A broader tribute, though, is the gardens of vast number of Inland Northwest gardeners who Mcrea mentored, nurtured and encouraged.

This sidebar appeared with the story: GARDENING Dial up the Clinic The Cooperative Extension Plant Clinic is staffed by Master Gardeners from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. Mondays through Thursdays. Call 477-2048 to talk to a Master Gardener. The Plant Clinic closes Nov. 24 for the season and will reopen March 1.