For the love of gardens Tour of Stewart estate to benefit scholarship fund

By all accounts, Carlo Ninfi was quite a man. In his 44 years of service as treasurer and tax collector for the town of Mount Desert, he made quite a few friends and very few enemies – he loved people. He also loved basketball – so much that he kept score at most every MDI High School game and drove the teams to away games when they didn’t have buses. And he had a green thumb, planting lots of tomatoes every summer to make pasta sauce in his family’s Italian tradition.

His granddaughter Whitney Williams Granholm followed in his footsteps. During her years at MDI High School and later, at Middlebury College in Vermont, she was a basketball star. Shortly after her graduation, she took a job as head gardener at the Northeast Harbor estate of Barbara and William Stewart.

Over the past five or six years, Granholm figures, she and her crew have planted more than 100,000 bulbs along a path that rings the property. Last fall, after the garden and grounds staff finished planting a shipment of 25,000 hyacinth, narcissus and tulip bulbs, Granholm thought it was a shame so few people got to enjoy the flowers in the spring. So she suggested holding a garden tour as a fund-raiser for a local charity. She just didn’t know which one.

When Ninfi passed away last January, and a scholarship fund was established in his name, Granholm knew that the garden tour would be the perfect way to benefit the fund and honor her grandfather’s memory.

“He loved to garden,” she said. “I used to garden with him when I was younger.”

The Stewarts agreed to open the grounds to the public in what Granholm hopes will be the first of many garden tours to benefit the Carlo A. Ninfi Scholarship Fund. The tour will take place from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Saturday, May 19, rain or shine at the Stewart property, located at 28 Sargent Drive, across from the Northeast Harbor golf course. A suggested donation of $8 per person will be added to the fund’s principal, and the interest will be divided among three students annually – a male and female basketball player at MDI High School and a student from the village of Hall Quarry, where Ninfi lived. The scholarships can be used for any type of post-secondary education.

The tour is well worth the donation.

A pine-needle path winds around the 9-acre property, which includes an impeccable white Colonial guesthouse and a shingled summer “cottage” that serves as the main house. From both, manicured lawns sweep down a gentle hill toward Somes Sound.

The path takes visitors through a gardener’s fantasyland – thousands of glorious blooms unfold in “waves of color,” such as indigo hyacinths that look like they’re lit from within, or a small tree wearing a veil of pale pink blossoms. The flowers’ names are as fantastic as they look: Violet Beauty, Blue Magic, Spellbinder and Green Pearl. All of the flowers will be labeled, so gardeners may want to bring a notepad to jot down ideas.

The path loops around the garden of the guesthouse, where flowering trees open up to a manicured lawn that sweeps toward Somes Sound. There, the perfume of hyacinths starts to mingle with the cool ocean air. The pine needles give way to slab-granite steps that lead down to a crushed pink granite path that borders the water.

On the hillside, narcissus blooms poke up from a ground cover of bearberry. From there, the path continues up, past a pond and through a wooded area that borders the hedge-fenced saltwater pool, and then back to the driveway.

The narcissus on the hill are spectacular in their own right – especially to the grounds crew, who spent 10 days digging holes with crowbars, planting the bulbs and covering the holes, assembly line-style.

“The process was hard, time-consuming, but when it comes up in the spring, we all think it’s worth it,” said Stacey McGarr, who works as a gardener at the estate. “When we were doing the back, we were like, ‘Ugh, this is the worst thing ever.’ But now that they’re coming up, it’s really nice.”

Despite the hard work, the bulbs get the crew going in the spring, when nothing else is blooming.

“It’s always this huge struggle, but we’re getting pretty good at it,” said Bobby Williams, Whitney’s sister. “It’s the last thing we do [in the fall] and it’s the first thing we see in the spring. … It gets us excited to be here because nothing is really happening.”

During a recent visit to the property, many flowers were close to their peak, while some had yet to bloom.

“We just hope the timing’s right,” said Larry Cough, who leads the grounds crew.

It looks like things are right on schedule. At the Stewart estate, spring has burst into bloom, filling the air with fragrance and the eyes with a rainbow of color – just the way Carlo Ninfi would have liked it.

“That’s why it’s nice to have a fund-raiser with his name on it,” Bobby Williams said. “Everybody knew him. And he loved flowers.”

In addition to Cough, McGarr, Williams Granholm and her sister Bobby, the grounds and gardening staff at the Stewart estate includes Rosie O’Grady, Dwayne Brown and Artie Smallidge.