Partial to Home: A bouquet on Seventh Street
Birney Imes
For years I’ve admired the yard of Glenda and Raymond Gross. Last week, seeing them at work, I stopped to admire their work up close and visit. I first met Raymond years ago at the YMCA when we both played handball.
Raymond Gross grew up in Harlan County, Kentucky, the son of a coal miner and a mother who tended the needs of her nine children, which included milking the family cow.
As did most kids growing up in the mid-century rural South, Raymond spent much of his childhood immersed in nature. “We did what country boys did,” he said. Each summer he and his buddies made their own swimming pool by damming Wallins Creek also the name of the small community he lived in. He foraged in the woods for ginseng, mayapple root and bloodroot, which they sold $2 a pound for the ginseng to a man Gross calls “our resident millionaire.”