Weed thrives on Greenbush Road

Thank goodness Charlotte doesn’t have a police department. When Joan Weed visited the home in 1996 where she now lives on Greenbush Road, she had to flee.

If there had been police stationed nearby, Weed might have been caught.

Weed had driven by the house several times and noticed a for-sale sign out front. She was beguiled.

Weed has been married three times and divorced twice; every time to Dick Weed. Before they remarried for the third time, she made it clear that if he wanted to marry her again, this time they would live in Vermont.

The Weeds were from Connecticut, and both of their roots went back to the 1600s in that state. He agreed, although it wasn’t an easy decision.

“Our families were 11 generations in Connecticut, so, it was a big upheaval,” Joan Weed said.

She had been flirting with the house for a while, driving by and stopping to walk around the outside when the owners weren’t home. She loved the garden. That was a big selling point for the columnist, who writes a monthly column for The Charlotte News on gardening and cooking.

Joan Weed had a real estate agent take her to see the house, but again the owner wasn’t home. Before they left, the real estate agent peered through the windows at the front door. He could see brochures on a table just inside. Having a key for the lock box hanging from the door handle, he said he would just slip inside and grab a brochure for her.

He hadn’t counted on the burglar alarm which went off. Weed and the real estate agent dashed to the car and beat a hasty retreat.

Later, Joan and Dick Weed revisited the house on Greenbush together, when the owner was home, and they could see the inside. They were immediately captivated.

“It was like love at first sight,” she said.

Everything was in bloom when the Weeds moved in on Aug. 1, 1996, but in particular, the Clethra. She remembers the date of the move because, at the first of August every year, the Clethra, or summer sweet, blooms in her garden and “perfumes the whole neighborhood.”

Later, after they had bought the house and were settling in, the owners visited to show the Weeds how a couple of things there worked.

During their conversation, the old owners mentioned how, one time when they were out, their burglar alarm had gone off. They never could figure out what had caused it.

Joan Weed didn’t say anything. “I almost clapped my hand over my mouth because it would be just like Dick to tell them who it was,” she said.

Charlotte residents talk about Joan Weed’s deep knowledge of plants, how to tend them and their Latin and common names.

Members of the Charlotte Congregational Church, who have been working on plans for building the church’s Sanctuary and Memorial Garden, appreciate her expertise as a member of the team overseeing the design of the outdoor area which will extend the church’s worship space beyond the walls of the historic church, a space for meditation or commemorative services.

“She has an encyclopedic knowledge of gardening and plants,” said team member Jim Hyde.

Dave Speidel, another team member, talked about what an asset she has been in helping select plants and in working with the landscape architect.

“As an amateur, I’m always impressed with her deep knowledge of the specific varieties that grow well in Vermont. She even knows the scientific species nomenclature of many,” Speidel said. “Maybe it’s because she’s a gardener, but she always has a sunny attitude about life in general.”

Sunny is an apt description of Joan Weed. It is a tribute to her positive nature that she has been able to remain so optimistic in the face of a number of family losses over the years.

In her immediate family, husband Dick Weed died in December 2017. Julie, one of her two daughters, died this past year.

She came from a family with seven kids where money was tight and had to drop out of the University of Connecticut after two years because of finances.

But Joan Weed has maintained a warm and welcoming approach to living. “I can’t remember a time when I heard Joan say a bad word about anybody,” Hyde said. “If she had any bad thoughts, I’m sure she’d find an elegant way to express them.”

Hyde added that she is such a wonderful storyteller “and has led a life that has given her lots of material. I could listen to her stories for hours.”

The Weeds were married for the first time in 1959, then were divorced after 25 years. After the divorce, Joan took her first adult job with a company that owned a string of weekly newspapers around New Haven, Conn. She worked there for 11 years as an ad builder, a legal proofreader and eventually in classifieds, until she had to quit because she was going to have two patients to take care of.

The Weeds’ oldest of three children, daughter Julie, was born with only one kidney, and it had never worked well. In 1989, Dick Weed gave one of his kidneys to their daughter. In those days before kidney transplants were done by minimally invasive or laparoscopic surgery, both the donor and recipient were cut from stomach to back. So, both daughter and father were confined to bed for months.

Shortly before the operations, the Weeds had remarried. When they divorced for a second time after several years, Joan moved to Vermont, partly to be close to her second daughter and first grandchild, partly because she had dreamed of living here for years. On a drive home from a vacation in the Green Mountain State, she had begun to fantasize about living here.

That kidney lasted for nine years, then Joan gave her daughter a kidney which lasted for more than 25 years.

Despite just having two years of college education, Joan Weed is well-educated. Her family may have been poor, but they were avid readers. Her first high school job was in a library, and she read almost everything she could get her hands on. She read by shelves, polishing off one shelf before moving on to another.

“I read the shelves of books that hadn’t been touched in years. They were covered with dust,” Joan said.

She read books of poetry and plays, and not just current plays, but old obscure plays that mainly theater scholars read.

Over the years, she took lots of different classes in different kinds of art — oil and watercolor painting, calligraphy, exploring what she refers to as her “different enthusiasms through the years.”

“Once I had moved to Vermont, I decided that I had better focus,” Joan Weed said.

It occurred to her that she had been a gardener for years, and she had taken so many art classes. She decided she should direct her efforts toward botanical painting.

“I actually belonged to the American Society of Botanical Artists,” Weed said. Her walls are adorned with many of the watercolors she has done of flowers.

And she studied to be a master gardener with the University of Vermont Extension after her move.

Although her professional career lasted 11 years, she has volunteered for decades, a proclivity that continued when she and her husband settled in Charlotte. She was the first volunteer at the library after it was built. She lasted in that role for more than a decade and through three library directors. Then she moved to the senior center and was a luncheon cook for the Monday Munches for quite a few years.

Now, her time in her garden is limited by a body ensnared by age. Although she still will get down on her knees to weed, getting back up becomes more of a hurdle with each passing year. She relies on garden helpers, and more and more serves as garden supervisor.

And as a garden writer. She had been friends with Melissa O’Brien, a former editor of The Charlotte News, for a couple of years. They had bonded when O’Brien posted on Front Porch Forum that her daughter was turning 8, and the only thing she wanted for her birthday was a real wooden toboggan.

It just so happened that Weed was going through a phase of getting rid of things. One of the things in her garage that she was looking to unload was an old toboggan.

In 2019, a couple of months after Dick Weed died, O’Brien asked her if she would like to write a column for the newspaper.

“That sounds just like the perfect thing to be doing right now,” Joan Weed said. “I love doing it. It was the perfect antidote at the right moment.”

She loves her home and her neighborhood, even though it wasn’t where they had meant to live. Joan and Dick Weed were looking elsewhere for a house to buy together. A small college town in Vermont seemed like just the thing to the couple at that time, but then a home a few houses down from the Old Brick Store intervened.

“It was the house that found us,” Joan Weed said. “We wanted to live in Middlebury. We thought a college town would be nice.”

But, gardening on Greenbush, what could be nicer?