Dick DeGray has been volunteering his time to take care of Brattleboro’s flower pots for about 10 years. At the height of summer, he wakes up at 2:30 a.m., seven days a week, to water all of the flowers before the roads get busy.
At 71, DeGray says this is his last season, as the schedule and physical toll is getting to be too much.
DeGray and his wife own a gift shop on Main Street in Brattleboro.
And the idea of running a flower program started innocently enough, on a cool late summer afternoon about 10 years ago, when DeGray thought the town needed a little sprucing up.
“You know, Missy and I would talk and go, ‘Why don’t we have flowers downtown?’” he recalled one day recently. “And so we went in and we said, ‘This group of people you take the east side of the street, and Missy and I will take the west side of the street.’ And that year we ended up fundraising enough money to do, I think we got 22 pots."
DeGray helped initially raise about $600 for flower pots, soil and plants.
And for the first year or two he walked up and down Main Street with a cart and 10 watering cans to take care of his flowers.
“I’d like to think when I’m done I’ve made Brattleboro a little bit better place. To make the community you want you got to be involved in it."Dick DeGray, volunteer with Brattleboro downtown flower program
But then the program grew, one pot at a time.
“It just kind of kept growing on its own,” DeGray said. “You know, I’d look at a spot and say, ‘Oh. This place would look good with flowers. And this would look good with flowers.’”
DeGray, who volunteers all of his time, now takes care of more than 200 flower pots, and Brattleboro’s downtown business organization supports his work with an annual budget of about $20,000.
Part of that money pays for a tricked-out pickup truck with a 300-gallon water tank, and an electric pump, attached to the truck’s engine, that allows DeGray to hold on to a six-foot long watering wand, he can extend from the driver's seat.
With permission from Brattleboro police, DeGray drives around town on the wrong side of the road, watering the pots from the driver’s seat. That’s why he starts his day at 3 a.m. when traffic is light and most of the parking spots are open.
On a recent hot summer morning, as he was starting his day, well before the sun was up, there were people on the street, stumbling around, looking for cigarettes or change.
DeGray said there’s been a lot more activity on the street in the early morning since the state started evicting people from the motel program.
And the flowers, he says, are for them, too.
“There’s people I know on the street. You know, you’re friends with them, ‘Hey. How ‘ya doing.' 'The flowers look great.' They’re not bad people, you know, they’re in bad situations,” DeGray said. “I have a lot of compassion for them. And, you know, there are things going on at night that people in Brattleboro have no idea of what’s going on, and it’s really changed our town.”
DeGray says this is the last year he’ll be taking care of Brattleboro’s flowers.
It’s an eight-month commitment, starting in April when he collects the pots out of storage and plants spring flowers, all the way through to the fall, when he plants mums, and then hauls every flower pot off the street until next year.
It’s a grueling job, and DeGray says it’s time for someone else to take it on.
“I decided in the spring, that you know, it’s time. Age has snuck up on me, and not in a good way,” he said.
DeGray is a former selectboard member, and an outspoken and opinionated resident who’s happy to share his views on property taxes, emergency services, road repair, the schools, or any other hot-button issue that Brattleboro is facing at the moment.
He worries about some of what he sees when he’s taking care of his flowers: people in the streets struggling with homelessness and mental health challenges, and drugs and property crimes that he says have become much more prevalent around the town he loves.
He knows the flowers won’t take care of all of that, but he does think they help.
“I’d like to think when I’m done I’ve made Brattleboro a little bit better place,” DeGray said. “To make the community you want you got to be involved in it. And too many people are sitting there with their keypads or their iPhones and all they want to do is tweet out negativity about what we’re not doing. Don’t be negative about everything that’s going on in Brattleboro. Yes, we have issues, but they’re not insurmountable.”
DeGray says it’s going to be hard to hand over the flowers to someone else.
And if they need someone to water them a few days a week, he says he’s game.
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