Orange oasis

By Jeff Poole
Review Managing Editor
Published: June 12, 2008

Everything has its place. Everything has its purpose. Even if it doesn’t seem like it. The mailbox holds the tools. The old washing machine is a planter. The empty soda bottles line the flower bed.
Tucked behind a 19th century home on a forgotten street in Orange is a garden unlike any other-just like the gardener.
Lulabelle Robinson is 70 years old and spends most of her day “pitter-pattering” around her back yard oasis on Mill Street.
What seems like a random collection of flowers and plants actually is. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t work. It most certainly does.
Robinson estimates she’s been gardening for more than 50 years-even before anyone else on Mill Street dared plant a garden. Or even grass.
“It was nothing but red clay. You swept the yard like you swept the floor in the house. We didn’t know nothing about grass. But when I had children, I made up my mind I was planting grass.
“People laughed at me, but once I got it to grow, everyone else did too.”
Robinson’s gotten just about everything to grow.
She’s got poppies and pansies, roses and rhododendrons, marigolds and moneyplants.
“I just started out putting seeds in the ground because I liked flowers,” she says simply. “I didn’t have a plan. I’d just plant some stuff and extend it. I’d dig here or dig there.”
The garden has evolved naturally. People give her cuttings or seeds and she gladly plants them-even naming them after their benefactors. At the same time, she unearths the flowers she’s tired of. “Sometimes, I just get sick of looking at it.”
It’s a simple process, she says. She puts her hands in the dirt, plants a seed and watches it grow. “It’s just nature,” she says. Simple enough.
Robinson gets up each morning, sits on her back step with a cup of coffee and finds the day’s inspiration among her flowering field.
Amid the blooms, empty, upside-down soda bottles curve gently marking the edge of one flower bed. Sawed logs stand upright at attention holding in another planting area. A green metal bed frame arches up from a planting at the far end of the yard-and fits right in.
“You can make something out of anything,” she says.
While Robinson surveys her handiwork, she’s not the only site supervisor. Scattered around the yard are a number of garden frogs and gnomes standing sentry over the plantings. “I love my gnomes and frogs,” she admits.
Orange has changed dramatically during her lifespan, but Robinson finds comfort in her haven. “I just concentrate on my yard and my family,” she says. “Sometimes, I go up the street and it just shocks me.”
So, she stays home, reads anything, writes poems and tends to her flowers amid her friends the gnomes and frogs.
“Putting my hands in the dirt, planting a seed, sitting back and watching it grow…you know, that’s a good feeling.”