From the Beginning: A Lifetime Dedicated to the Gardens

Charter members since 1996 and volunteers since 1999, Mollie and Wells Moore have been integral to the Gardens, from mobilizing a group to travel the world investigating sensory gardens to Mollie’s two terms on the Board of Directors to Wells’ chairing of the grounds committee in 2004. In the end, their extraordinary efforts have helped shape what Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens is today.

In April of 2000, their lives and, subsequently their involvement with the Gardens, changed dramatically. After a pneumonia diagnosis escalated to pneumococcal meningitis, Mollie became blind overnight. Despite this drastic change in circumstance, Mollie, a longtime gardening enthusiast, didn’t let her new reality compromise her enjoyment of nature.

“Shortly after we returned to the US in 2000,” Mollie explains, “I asked the Board of Directors if they had plans for a sensory garden, and they said yes, but not right away.” However, the Board did say that if Mollie and Wells wanted to spearhead the project and move ahead with plans, it would be both welcome and helpful. Suiting the word to the deed, Mollie and Wells immediately formed a committee, asking Ray Cave, Pat Ryan, Cathy Kahn, and Elsie Freedman to join them. “We all agreed that this garden needed to be a focal point,” remembers Mollie, “not tucked away in a corner like so many sensory gardens are.” In answer, Mollie proposed that it be a garden for everybody and call it “the gardens of the five senses.”

From there, she and Wells and the committee visited sensory gardens all over the world, from the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens to the Eden Project, UK, and Oizumi Ryokuchi Park in Osaka, Japan. “The garden in Osaka we especially liked,” she says. “Elsie went there and met with the architect, which was very helpful.” After seven years of research and fundraising, when it came time to implement the design, “our architect said they were some of the best plans he’d ever had in his career,” Mollie recalls. “So that made us feel pretty good.”

Adding to the funds the committee itself had raised, Dan and Lyn Lerner came forward to contribute the remainder needed to break ground. “The Lerners fell in love with the idea too, and it is one of the most popular gardens we have. So,” she concludes, “all in all, I think we did something good.” The Lerner Garden of the Five Senses opened to the public in 2009.

Mollie and Wells are members of the Perennial Society, which recognizes their intention to gift property to the Gardens in their estate plans.