Grayzar No. 1 gardener

By ESTHER MCCOY, Staff writer
A hobby that has really grown since she retired as a Buckeye Local School District bus driver in 1997 was rewarding for Ann Marie Grayzar this month.

After a five-year membership with the Rosebud Garden Club, she received the outstanding amateur gardener award, not from the club but in the entire Region 12 of the Ohio Association of Garden Clubs.

After her retirement, she invested in a garden tiller and after telling her uncle and best friend, Stanley Krulcik, her dream of a lovely garden circled with a stone path, she discovered him plowing up areas around her yard for the venture one day.

Ann Marie and friends gathered up flat stones from anywhere they could be found and laid the path around the floral wonderland. “I was always on the lookout for stones, and I go to yard sales to find lawn ornaments to put throughout the plants,” she said.

She plants many annuals but has perennials, some vegetables blended in, herbs and hemlock bushes that she dug up in the woods and was told they would never survive in her garden. She even has horseradish growing and has become quite good at using herbs as a substitute for salt in her cooking.

Grayzar does container gardening, and there is a shade garden that looks cool and inviting despite the hot temperature of the day.

“I take pictures of my flowers, put them in an album and look at them in the winter when the weather is bad. It brings spring and summer back to me. I also take photos for our club,” she said.

Ann Marie has hosted Rosebud Garden Club meetings on her back porch where the gardens can be viewed from two angles. “I like being a member of the garden club. I get to meet many people and pick up different ideas about gardening,” she related.

She belongs to the Smithfield Historical Society and is quite interested in past events of the area, researching Piney Fork history with John Borkowski to do two different books on the mining area.

Grayzar could be found helping with the Northern Cemetery cleanup in May and was back at the job in June, cleaning and painting in the mausoleum, even though she has no relatives entombed there.

She had to draw a diagram of each plant in her garden, know the horticulture name of each plant and have them mulched to the judges’ perfection to win the award. Several points were taken off because of the mulch but her work was still tops with the judges.

Ann Marie is the mother of Jennifer, who lives in San Francisco; Connie, in Washington; and Tracy, in Cranberry, Pa.

Jennifer’s rabbit once played havoc with her mother’s parsley when the fuzzy animal was put in the basement during a cold spell and got hungry for some greens.