Until she moved to Clinton three years ago, Barbara Beales has always lived on a farm. She loves being outdoors, loves watching nature, and most of all, loves growing flowers.
“I have had a flower garden for as long as I can remember,” she said. “We did anything we could do to make the old farm look nicer.”
So when she moved to a duplex in Clinton, she put in a spring flower garden in front of her house on Green Street, on the corner of 7th, despite having arthritis that makes it difficult to stand. She replants it with colorful mums in the fall, and likes to sit in her wheeled chair in the garage with the garage door open and watch the cars go by.
“People wave at me every day,” she said. “Sometimes they stop and take pictures. Some drive by and then come back real slow to take another look.
“People holler at me, ‘I love your garden.’”
Last June, Barbara’s corner garden was chosen as the Twilight Garden Club’s Yard of the Month. Now, she has transformed it for fall, with tubs of autumn-colored chrysanthemums accented with pumpkins, caliabraicli blossoms, variegated coleus, Wandering Jew and red geraniums.
She grew a clump of “Prince Tut” grass, a dwarf Egyptian papyrus, pairing it with pink geraniums, but said it succumbed to the heat. The red geraniums are left over from her summer garden.
“Geraniums were my mother’s favorite flower,” Barbara said.
One of four children, Barbara was born in St. Charles, Mo. She grew up near Cedar Hill, Mo., southwest of St. Louis, and went to Hillsboro Schools, she said, and remembers that she and her classmates always had a garden stand that sold seed packets, bedding plants and vegetable starts.
Her mother bought most of them, she recalled.
Barbara’s mother, Fern Melinda Davis, was from Winterset, Ohio. Her father was from High Gate, Mo., north of Rolla.
“It’s now just three cemeteries, the churches and the people who live in the surrounding area,” Barbara said.
Of her family, she has an older brother, who lives in Dittmer, Mo., near Cedar Hill. Dittmer used to have a grocery store with a post office inside, plus a hardware store, a filling station and a couple of churches, Barbara said.
“They are now all gone,” she said.
Also gone are her two sisters, an older brother and her husband, Zachery Beales, who passed away three years ago. Zachery was a firefighter for the city of Independence for 27 years, she said, before he had to retire due to disability.
”I have some police officers and firefighters who drive by and wave,” Barbara said.
She and Zachery lived for 30 years on a mini-farm in the Holden/Kingsville area, where they moved in 1991. Barbara enjoyed watching the wildlife that came to their pond, which included a bobcat who brought her kits to the pond to drink.
Barbara also watched the geese fly north in the spring and fly south in the fall, and enjoyed the flocks of pelicans that stopped to rest on the pond.
“There were also deer, coyote and a pair of bald eagles that had a nest in the woods until the wind blew the tree over,” she said.
Now, at 81 years of age, she tends her garden, and watches the birds and butterflies that come to the garden on Green Street on their migrations. The first of the month, the hummingbirds go through, she said, and the monarch butterflies. Now, it’s sparrows and starlings, she said. She has seen an immature eagle fly over, and the garden still draws yellow butterflies.
She also likes watching the squirrels, which are plentiful, given the walnut, pecan and hickory trees in the neighborhood.
Traffic also goes back and forth on Green Street, usually too fast, she said. In the spring, there are the big grain trucks going to the Miller Seed Plant, and the tractors that come through town.
When she lived near Holden, the traffic was mostly farm machinery and cattle trucks that belonged to their neighbors.
Barbara took her pots to Green Streets Market last spring and asked for the flowers she wanted in them. Tending the garden gives her something to do, she said. One morning last week, she was up early, clearing all the fallen leaves off her driveway, which she does with a leaf blower as long as the battery lasts, then gets out the broom.
When she’s not doing yard work, she enjoys sitting in the sun in her wheeled chair in the garage with the door open, watching cars go by. She keeps a mystery book at hand to read. Good friends from Osceola come up to Clinton to take her grocery shopping once a week, she said, and to do errands.
She is known in town as the Flower Lady, Barbara said “I put out flowers to enjoy them, and for other people to enjoy them,” she said, “and to brighten the world.”
She is not an indoor person, and is not looking forward to winter. She doesn’t have any place to move plants in when it frosts.
“I hope they make it to the end of the month,” she said.
