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Living Life After 50
Allen County edition ReAChing FoRt WAyne And SuRRounding CountieS
August 2025
Vol. 38, No. 4
www.seniorlifenewspapers.com
DISPLAY GARDEN — Master gardeners Marlene Purdy, left, and Gwen Raupfer survey the Purdue Extension’s display garden.
POTTING SHED — This quaint little cottage is actually a potting shed.
Master gardeners love diggin' in the dirt Text and Photos By LINDA LIPP Feature Writer
Marlene Purdy, Gwen Raupfer and Simone Alberding just love playing in the dirt. The three women are master gardeners with Purdue Extension in Fort Wayne. They put their passion for plants and gardening skills to good use helping lead the extension’s display garden team. Raupfer, the newbie, has been volunteering for 11 years, Purdy for 21, and Alberding for 27. “I started as a baby,” joked Alberding. Raupfer joined the master gardener program shortly after moving to Fort Wayne.
“I always enjoyed gardening as a way to get out into nature and cultivate nature and also, I was new to town. It was a way of getting to know people who shared some of the same values — care for the earth, respect for the earth,” she said. Purdy inherited a love of gardening from her mother. Roses were her mother’s favorite, and she still has a rosebush she removed from her mother’s garden after she died 20 years ago. The master gardener program originated in the 1970s in Oregon. Volunteers were recruited and trained to assist overworked extension agents. Aligned with land grant colleges, extension programs expanded to all 50
states, and in Indiana, associated with Purdue University. The local display garden, really a series of connected gardens, wraps around the extension’s freestanding offices on the edge of the Purdue Fort Wayne campus. It has expanded enormously over the years, Alberding said. “The display garden is beautiful and it’s a great teaching tool,” said Cora Hill, the extension service’s urban agriculture and horticulture educator. Some of the gardens are devoted to flowering and decorative plants. The Monet garden, for example, displays only the colors found in Claude Monet’s paintings. The prairie garden
shows off the kinds of native plants that would have greeted settlers on the western side of Indiana, where the great prairie begins. A vegetable garden produces hundreds of pounds of vegetables every year for the Purdue student food pantry. Three beehives produce honey for the pantry. The display garden is open to the public 24/7. Among other things, master gardeners also grow plants at the Lawton Park greenhouse to be used in public parks across Fort Wayne, including the Botanical Conservatory downtown. Three days a week — Monday, Wednesday, and Friday — volunteers operate the master gardener
hotline, answering gardening questions, researching callers’ issues and providing advice. The first step to qualify as a master gardener is to take a 13-week course offered through the extension service twice a year. Classes are held once a week, for three hours on Monday afternoons. The next course begins Monday, Aug.18. After the classwork, participants must pass a test. It covers a lot of ground but it’s administered in an open-book fashion. “We don’t want to task people to memorize information. What we care about is their ability to find information,” Hill said.
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