There will be no more digging up dirt around City Hall for Janice Noe.
The first lady of Edmonds’ flower program retires today, June 1, after 22 years of planning, planting and tending the showy curbside gardens and hanging baskets for which Edmonds is renown. “My body has been strong. I’m still healthy. I don’t want to wait (for retirement) until I can’t do this job anymore” said 57-year-old Noe. “I want to sell high.”
Edmonds’ civic flower program began in the 1970s with 32 flower baskets and a few corner parks, said parks-maintenance manager Rich Lindsay. Today, the city has 144 flower baskets and 60 corner parks plus plantings at building entrances and gateways to the downtown area. The brilliant displays that star in tourists’ vacation photos are planted by Noe and others on the parks crew with the help of the Edmonds Floretum Garden Club.
Noe, who said she’s always been a “flower person,” joined the parks staff as an entry-level maintenance worker in 1985. About five years later, she took on the job of nursery person. Her responsibilities have grown to include designing displays, selecting and ordering materials, planting 20,000 seeds and growing the flowers in the city greenhouses.
Along with Debra Dill – who eventually will assume the lead nursery-person job – and other members of the parks crew, Noe also has been responsible for prepping the beds and baskets for planting, weeding, feeding, fertilizing and deadheading flowers throughout the growing season. Rich Romero, the city’s irrigation specialist, is “totally key to the success of the (flower) program … he saves us constant, constant attention (to the flowers),” Noe said.
The best part of her job is creative license in regard to color schemes and plant choices, Noe said.
“Creative license is so cool. We never were vetoed,” she said.
Lindsay said Noe’s strong suit is “professionalism and eye for detail.”
Barbara Chase, past president of the Floretum Garden Club, said Noe is “the heart and soul of the flower program. Her thing is that she really knows her plants and she’s been quite creative … and she’s a hard worker.”
Like home gardeners, Noe said she spends the off-season thumbing through plant catalogs. She admits the flower crew has a “tough time keeping it simple.” One litmus test is “if it isn’t beautiful, it doesn’t have a place in this program,” she said.
“I think we must have had a budget,” Noe said, adding that her bosses never bugged her about it. “We were pretty good about self-limiting … and we grew nearly everything from seed so we could do more.”
The city pays about $32,000 for materials and seasonal help for the flower program, according to Lindsay.
To pick a favorite display, Noe turns to photo albums in which nearly every display is documented. Her winner is 2001, with it’s cacophony of blues, lavenders, yellows and whites courtesy of rudbeckia, Irish eyes, delphiniums, blue butterflies, salvia strata, lobelia and more.
It is the people she worked with and for who made the job worthwhile, Noe said. She emotionally recalled Melinda Duell, her fellow flower lady of 15 years and wife of co-worker Romero, who lost her struggle with cancer in 2005. Countless compliments from passersby always made her day.
And yes, Noe does nose around other cities’ flower programs to glean ideas. She said she believes “Edmonds is unique because it has this really adorable downtown that lends itself to this kind of beautification.”
With her new-found leisure time, the Edmonds resident said she will focus on her own garden.
“My garden is kinda like a mechanic’s car” — always in need of attention by the owner/expert, she said. “One of the things I’ve always wanted to do is work in my garden in the summer.
“I’m pretty OK with work until August. Then you water, water, water and then you get home and guess what? You have to water some more.”
Noe said she’s also looking forward to “actually using her lawn furniture, remodeling her kitchen, reading, taking up a watercolor class, jewelry making, traveling and spending time with family,” which includes Steve, her husband, and Zephyr, the cat.
Our lives, Noe said, are like a plant’s life cycle.
“Plants are keyed into doing what they need to do to survive. They do their thing and send down roots. Out pops shoots, then blooms. But there comes a point when no matter what happens, you reach the end.
“We don’t know the time or date when we will reach the end. What we have is right now.”
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