Three villagers in three successive generations have taken care of the garden on the triangle at the intersection of Kline and Highland Roads with Oak Hill Road and The Parkway since the 1980s. In recent years, Karen Gilovich of Oak Hill has been the gardener; she was preceded by Mary Esther Wilson of Oak Hill Place and Michael Morley of Highland Road. The contribution these three have made to our community is special and calls out to be recognized.
Not long after moving here with her family more than thirty years ago, Gilovich noticed a woman pushing a lawn mower down the sidewalk on Oak Hill Road and across the intersection to mow the grass on the triangle. That was Midge Wilson (as Mary Esther was known), a daughter of Cornell law professor Lyman Wilson and Edith Wilson who moved here in 1923 and built the house at 106 Oak Hill Place in the White Park section of Cayuga Heights. After attending Cayuga Heights Elementary School, Midge went to Ithaca High School, where she was vice president of her senior class, and graduated from Wells College. In the 1930s, she moved to New York City and took a job in advertising; hired as a stenographer, she was promoted a decade later to a position as what was then called an executive secretary. In the 1950 federal census, her parents listed her as a member of their Ithaca household while she was earning a secretarial salary of $2,000 in Manhattan, and her father was making $5,000 a year at Cornell.
After her parents died, Wilson inherited the house, rented it to tenants in the 1970s, and then moved back home to stay until her death in 2008. Long-time neighbors Diana Riesman and Carole Schiffman of Oak Hill Road remember Midge fondly as a stylish and lovely person who shared stories about choosing the names of colors for clients in the textile business during her advertising career. Though she didn’t install any plants, that experience may have influenced her interest in the appearance of the triangle and the impression it made on passersby. An active Girl Scout while growing up, she certainly would have felt she was fulfilling an obligation of community service for her hometown. In any event, as Gilovich points out, Wilson set an example to follow.
Sometime after Wilson was no longer looking after it, unbeknownst to Gilovich or anyone else in the neighborhood, Michael Morley became the second villager to take care of the triangle. He hired a landscape gardening service and had perennials and shrubbery planted at his own expense. A math professor at Cornell, he and his wife Vivienne Brenner Morley, also a mathematician, lived for many years right across the street at 325 Highland Road in the house that can be seen in the background of the garden photo. Maybe its equilateral shape—each side of the triangle being about thirty feet long—appealed to him, or he just thought the interesting space directly in front of his home deserved attention. In any event, sometime before he died in 2020, Gilovich, still not knowing who the caregiver had been, noticed the garden was no longer being looked after, so she decided to step up.
If Wilson and Morley weren’t hands-on gardeners, Gilovich would be, and one morning not long after she set to work, she finally met her predecessor when he came out to greet her in a robe and pajamas. In response to his telling her how much he appreciated what she was doing now that he could no longer carry on, she replied that she was “delighted for it to be my turn.” Those who knew Professor Morley remember him fondly; his advisees at Cornell referred to him as “Uncle Mike.” If you want to put a smile on your face, read the hilarious obituary he wrote for himself in the October 17, 2020, issue of the Ithaca Journal (on page A11). Its publication evoked righteous indignation on the part of readers who didn’t stop to think it might have been a self-effacing parody, which led the paper to announce a change of editorial policy a few days later.
Gilovich, when asked to describe herself as a gardener, will tell you she simply loves plants and even enjoys digging in the dirt. Lots of weeding along with improving the soil was required at first; it took until 2023 to get rid of common bindweed (Convolvulus) clinging to the plants, and highly invasive horsetail (Equisetum arvense) was another challenge. Like all careful gardeners, Karen always cleans her tools with rubbing alcohol to avoid cross contaminating one garden with unwanted material from another. At that early stage, most of her work was about “subtraction,” meaning cutting back, without the use of any pesticides or weed killers. Maintenance with lots of weeding and more cutting back have taken most of her time in the garden since; Russian sage (Perovskia atriplicifolia) is one of the perennials requiring attention all summer long. New plants Gilovich has added to those put in by Morley include dwarf hydrangeas and sedums. It’s important to keep all the plants low, of course, to avoid obstructing the view of drivers and cyclists at the intersection and to make sure they don’t compete with the two stop signs sharing the garden space. When Karen is stumped, she consults Barbara Martin, a wonderful landscape designer who helps with the gardens at her home.
Every year a large clump of sunny yellow trumpet daffodils in the middle of the triangle announces spring, surrounded by deciduous barberry bushes that outline the triangle with russet color year-round. Though a prohibited species in New York State, meaning no new ones can be added, established barberry bushes such as these needn’t be removed. Pink shrub roses, which were part of Morley’s gift to the village, bloom in June. Tricky to grow in our climate like other rose varieties, these are the Rosa ‘Knock Out’ cultivar.
It is a lot of work, Gilovich freely admits, keeping a garden like this as tidy as she wants it to be without the use of pesticides. Neighbor Brett De Bary, who has a unique vantage point overlooking the garden from her home on the knoll right above the intersection, came by one day when Gilovich was there working and asked her lots of questions. Very impressed with what Gilovich was doing, De Bary decided she deserved assistance and got in touch with Mayor Linda Woodard who, in turn, enlisted the village Department of Public Works to deliver mulch and topsoil. “The DPW guys at the village barn have been sweet, generous, and responsive,” Gilovich is quick to comment. Let it be noted as well that her husband, Tom Gilovich, is available for heavy lifting. Watering is a consistent challenge, meaning many containers must be brought to the site by car one load after another in dry weather. The trick Gilovich has mastered is not using too many heavy drinkers in the planting scheme.
Not surprisingly, many people come by and tell her how much they admire “her garden”; a couple have even tried to hire her to work on theirs. But “no,” Gilovich is quick to explain, not only is she not a professional gardener, the garden doesn’t belong to her but to the village and the whole community. It plays an important role welcoming residents driving to and from Cornell and downtown Ithaca as well as visitors. Indeed, developers Jared Newman and Charles Blood considered the four-way intersection the triangle demarcates the entrance to Cayuga Heights because early in the twentieth century the land between it and Cornell Heights was part of the Ithaca Country Club. Feel free to stop by and add your thanks to Gilovich when you see her working there. And, yes, you are right if you think that at some point, who knows when, someone else will need to step up and care for the intergenerational garden we all enjoy.
Beatrice Szekely, Village Historian
