Pat Agatisa [00:20:43] Well, in Brooklyn, we had a small garden that my mother tended to and it was more of the rhododendrons and forsythia and impatiens. And I remember there were... There was a peach tree and a nectarine tree in the backyard that my dad had planted. And as a result, I hate peaches and nectarines because that's what we ate all summer. And we had peach pie and peach cobbler and nectarine this and that. I cannot eat those fruit, you know, but I didn't tend to it.

Oh, though I remember one... I forgot about that. When I was probably middle school age, I decided to rip up part of the backyard and plant a vegetable garden while my dad was at work. So my younger sister—I have three sisters, some of them must've helped me—and we tore up the backyard and my father came home and I think he could have killed us for ripping up the lawn. But we were getting ready to plant tomatoes and basil. And I'm Italian. Agatisa is my name. My husband's name is Boyle. So, you know, it was like ingrained in us. You had to have tomatoes and basil growing.

Yeah. So that was my first garden, now that I think of it. When we moved to Pittsburgh, we bought kind of a brownstone that had a postage-stamp front yard and back yard. You know, that I... I had neighbors that advised me. There was one man two doors down that helped me with designing the front yard. And the back yard had the most majestic magnolia tree that... My neighbor had grown up in the house that I lived in and then moved next door and she said that her family had planted that tree. So when we were there, it was like 30 years old. So it was beautiful. And we took pictures of it before we moved because we knew we'd miss the magnolia tree. But they were small.

And then when I moved to my house in Shaker the previous owner had done a lot of gardening. So the backbones were there. And, you know, I had to hire a landscaper and Dozie [Herbruck] was next door and she's an avid gardener. And she would come over and hint—weed. [laughs] If you walk through Dozie's... If she'd come and visit, if she'd walk through my lawn, she'd be picking all of these things out, you know, and I'm like, Dozie, it's okay, it's green. If it isn't a blade of grass, she's a fanatic. I tell my landscapers as long as it's green, I don't care. Yeah, but she helped me a lot. And, you know, by trial and error, I started planting different things and...

[00:23:44] It's it's a huge garden. We have an acre and a half. So there is gardens in the back, gardens on the side, gardens in the front. Many of my plants are donations from Dozie and other, now, other Village Garden Club members. We do plant swaps, which is really handy. So I really try to plant perennials, not annuals, getting more into more native plants instead of, you know, ornamentals that are short-lived.

Pat Agatisa [00:36:13] I initiated a program called Adopt a Tree because we have now, thirty... Goodness. I can't remember now. We have thirty-nine trees, and it's a lot of work. You know, we weed them, you know, we try to get the stuff out. If there's daffodils growing in the spring, we try to get rid of all the dead leaves and that kind of stuff. And we need somebody to have eyes on the trees so if there's any damage, they can tell me because I can't be there all the time. So, of the thirty-nine trees, about twenty-something, or probably about twenty of them fortunately are adopted... So it's been successful. And funny thing, Dozie and I were there at the Grove one day tending to our trees and this father, young father, and his like four-year-old daughter came along and they asked what we were doing and we told them and they're like, can we adopt a tree? And they did.