Gary Watros' hobby grows into a Garden Club presidency
BRISTOL
For much of his adult life, gardening has been Gary Watros' perennial companion, providing pleasant challenges for the problem-solver in him and smoothing out the bumps in the road of life.
So it was axiomatic that when Watros retired from a federal government job as an aeronautical engineer and moved here from the Boston area, he would seek a congenial forum for learning more about gardening.
For Watros, a man who defies categorization, that venue turned out to be the Bristol Garden Club.
Not only did Watros become the first -- and only -- male member of the club six and a half years ago, but he was recently installed as its president.
"I have a strong feminine side, and I'm man enough to admit it," said Watros, 63.
"Part of that might have to do with being garrulous," Watros said.
"But that might be a sexist remark, so I'll retract it," he quipped in the next breath.
During his first summer in Bristol, in 1998, Watros went to the home of a member of the Bristol Garden Club to buy a ticket for a garden tour -- he loves garden tours -- and asked whether the club allowed men to join.
"There was a very definite quiet moment," Watros said.
"People looked at each other, and someone said, 'Sure.' "
Several months later, at the Garden Club's December luncheon meeting in the home of Lin Kinder, Watros was introduced to Agnes Bruno, one of the original members of the club, which was founded in 1928.
Any other men who might have been in the house had already left, he said.
And Bruno, then in her 90s, "said to me, 'What are you doing here?'
"I said, 'I was walking down the street and saw all these nice ladies and followed the crowd.' "
Another club member, Annabelle Caffrey, gently told Bruno later in the meeting that Watros was to be made a member of the club.
"Agnes said, 'We got along fine without them all these years. I don't see why we ought to change.' "
Bruno's brush-off not withstanding, Watros says he has always enjoyed the company of women more than men, particularly when it comes to figuring out personal relationships.
Even as a child, he observed differences in conversation between men and women.
After Sunday dinner at his grandparents' house in upstate New York, the men in his farming family stayed in the dining room and talked about tractors and gutters.
The women moved to the kitchen, where they talked about people they knew and "things more important to the soul," Watros recalls.
He moved into the kitchen with them.
"I made a point of trying to learn about communication, about what is important in relating to people," he said.
Watros discovered Bristol by chance.
A native of Seneca Falls, N.Y., he is an aeronautical engineer by profession. He went straight from the Rennselaer Polytechnic Institute to Mission Control in Houston in 1964.
In the next six years, whenever the cameras trained on Mission Control during the countdown to a rocket launching, Watros' face was among those that showed up on millions of television screens across the country.
"I was the one with the shaggy blond hair in the upper right-hand corner," he said.
A problem-solver by nature, Watros worked with others to anticipate design flaws -- and fix them -- before anything had a chance to go wrong in space.
When the unthinkable did happen and an oxygen tank ruptured and exploded on Apollo 13 in 1970, Watros came in from his day off and helped figure out how to safely return the astronauts to earth.
After Apollo 14 later that year, his career took a more sedate turn as he moved to the Boston area and settled into research work for the U.S. Department of Transportation.
Watros lived in Winchester with his daughter, Juliane, and his wife, Roberta, and commuted to his job in Cambridge.
Without warning, in July 1993, Roberta died.
Then 46, she suffered a massive heart attack in her sleep, the result of an undiagnosed heart condition.
Juliane was just 13.
No one can ever prepare for life-changing events like the death of a spouse, Watros said, but what matters is "how you handle it."
Left alone with his 13-year-old daughter, Watros said he found an "opportunity to grow" that he might have missed if his life had followed a more predictable path.
His sister- and mother-in-law helped Watros see Juliane through her adolescence into adulthood. And during that time, he said, his regard deepened for women's skills in communication and their embrace of the gamut of human emotion.
"I learned a lot about life," he said.
"When you go through something like that, you develop an appreciation for the moment.
"You know that no matter what your life is like, it's not going to be like that forever and maybe not even past tomorrow," he said.
When Juliane was a senior in high school, looking at colleges, Watros was planning his own transition into retirement.
While he and Juliane were on a driving tour of colleges one dismal November day in 1997, they stopped for lunch in the center of Bristol.
"I liked what I saw," he said.
He was immediately struck by the charm of the well-maintained Federal period architecture, as well as Bristol's perch on Narragansett Bay.
But he said it wasn't until he sold his big Victorian house in Winchester and moved the following summer that he was able to pick up on Bristol's sense of community, conveyed by many welcoming residents eager to draw him into the life of the town.
There are "so many organizations," he said. "You can get sucked into everything."
And he has been.
In addition to the Garden Club, Watros has been drawn into the Historic District Commission, as well as the Pastime Theater Foundation, which seeks to reopen a former cinema on Bradford Street as a nonprofit performing-arts center.
He also volunteers at Linden Place, the restored 1810 mansion on Hope Street, which backs up onto the rear of his own yard.
William DeWolfe, who owned Linden Place, built the house Watros now calls home in 1840.
"Far be it from me to say he built it for his mistress," Watros said in a speculative vein.
But Watros, who has given tours at Linden Place, said history accepts the fact that DeWolfe did have a mistress. The couple left town together in 1850, he said.
Watros' home, which faces High Street, was constructed of stone in the Greek Revival style. But in the 1870s, the merchant Ramon Guiteras added Victorian embellishments, including a porch and a gable in front and a tower to one side.
The house is set on a half-acre lot, where Watros gardens in a low-key way, defining spaces with undulating stone walls and borders bursting with the heart-shaped foliage of hosta in soothing shades of green.
All types of flowers are welcome in his collection, long as they don't become fussy and demanding.
"They know the rules," said Watros, who has some easy-going roses and a spectacular tree peony outside his kitchen door.
While the Garden Club was once primarily a social affair, "it has become a place for learning about gardening, the environment and birds," he said.
Watros has adopted an ambitious agenda for the club's 50 members, not the least of which is bringing in at least one other man.
"The ladies need more help with the heavy lifting," he said.
In August, there will be a walking tour of Portuguese gardens, to be sponsored jointly by the Garden Club and the Mosaico Community Development Corporation.
Another goal is to finish planting the entrance to Silver Creek, the evolving six-acre park off Hope Street, between the Guiteras School and the historic Bosworth-Perry residence, the former home of Mrs. William Perry, founder of the Garden Club.
Recently, Watros and other Garden Club members took fourth graders in as part of the Sense of Pride program, leading them in a cleanup of the garden behind the Rogers Free Library that the club restored more than 40 years ago.
The Garden Club also maintains planters at the library entrance on Hope Street, a traffic island at the south end of town where Bristol Ferry Road comes together with Hope and Wood streets, and another island where Thames Street runs in to Hope Street at the northern end of the downtown district.
If the truth be told, Watros tried to wriggle out of his two-year term as president of the garden club.
"I said I could not do it. They said, 'Will you please do it.' "
At the installation luncheon early last month, outgoing president Jane Perkins presented each board member with a finely detailed cross-stitch sampler of a different flower.
Watros got a thistle, set in a frame shaped like a watering can.
"I don't know why it has given me such pleasure to torment this very capable, hard-working person," Perkins said in presenting her token of appreciation.
"But Robert the Bruce in Scotland won a war against the English by using this pretty little plant.
"And I sincerely hope that scratches I have inflicted over the years have not affected a good relationship."
She called the cross-stitched thistle a "peace offering ... to a great guy who took all my grief manfully."
Watros had been in line for the president's job for two years, ever since he accepted the vice president's position in 2003.
He finally relented because he felt indebted to the club.
"I feel it's a great club, with wonderful people. "
"They've been there for me," he said.
In the summer of 2001, Watros was planning to marry a second time when his fiancee, Diane Passan, was diagnosed with brain cancer.
Two months before the wedding, set for Aug. 12, Diane was at work as the manager of a research lab at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston when she suddenly felt ill.
Her colleagues "marched her to the emergency room," Watros said, and she went into surgery as Watros was driving north on Massachusetts Route 24 toward Boston.
The wedding, at Blithewold, the turn-of-the century mansion and gardens with a lawn that rolls down to Narragansett Bay, "was terrific, " Watros said.
"I just wanted her to have the best weekend of her life," he said.
The cancer and the drugs used to fight it affected every aspect of the couple's existence for the 14 months they were married.
Diane died Oct. 16, 2002.
Members of the Garden Club, who had made up a big contingent at the wedding, remained steadfast in the year that followed.
"They were a great support to me," Watros said.
"We would come home and there would be casserole ... or a bag of soup hanging from the doorknob," Watros said.
For a graveside service in Juniper Hill Cemetery, members of the Garden Club hauled in potted shrubs -- some dug up from their own gardens -- and other plant material to create a natural, if temporary, enclosure, recalled Jane Perkins, the immediate past president.
A photo of Diane hangs on the wall in Watros' kitchen, the hub of the house, along with pictures of Juliane, now an elementary school teacher, Diane's son, Adam, and the new woman in Watros' life, Beverly.
A door in the kitchen opens onto a courtyard framed by two arbors that Watros bought on one of the days he visited Diane at Brigham and Women's Hospital in summer 2001.
The arbors were set up at Blitheold for the wedding service and then moved to the house on High Street, where they have become daily reminders of that day -- and Diane.
"If things ever get difficult, I'm just reminded of what she went through," Watros said. "She is my hero."
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