Edwin Summers might’ve liked dirt, but he wasn’t wild about flowers.
So in addition to working for the Army Corps of Engineers, he owned a pair of farms – one behind his house south of Excelsior Springs, another in Polo.
Edwin left the flower gardening to his wife, Norma, who had two green thumbs and over time created a unplanned Prathersville landmark.
Norma Summers was 24 years younger than Edwin, who took a new bride when he’d already turned 70.
Before she came to the U.S. in 1985, Norma had left her birthplace home in the Philippines and spent some time in England.
At home, she’d farmed coconuts, bananas, rice and sweet potatoes in the year-round tropical climate. One of eight children, she also developed a love for flowers, the kind that bloomed all year in the Philippines’ humid, summer-like conditions.
But flowers and the words used to describe them were different when Norma, 46, settled in America. When she moved into Edwin’s house in Prathersville on H Highway, she found a yard taken over by weeds.
As she settled in, she began to look around. Slowly, she uncovered flowers that Edwin’s first wife, Judy, had cared for. An Alzheimer’s patient, Judy Summers’s last years were spent in a nursing home, where Edwin visited and cared for her.
But at home, there was no one tending to Judy’s flowers.
That was until Norma uncovered lilies that had been hidden by weeds. She said first step was to clear out the area and let them breathe.
“The plants need to scatter,” she said. “They don’t like to be squeezed. They need room.”
Three years later, the lilies she found bloomed.
“The weeds were choking them,” Norma recalled.
Then she spotted a rose bush that was also hemmed in.
“I moved it here in the front,” she said. “I pruned it. I cultivated it. I called it a Judy Rose because my husband’s wife planted it.”
She cared for that rose bush, as if it were the final living link to Judy’s memory.
“It reminds me of her,” said Norma, whose mother named her in honor of Norma Shearer, an American actress.
Read the rest of this story in the Friday, July 22 issue of the Standard