Roadside hill blooms throughout seasons

It’s mid-August, and as usual Linda Spangle’s steeply terraced flower garden along U.S. 93 in Kalispell is a stunning array of blooms.

The garden flowers throughout the growing season, starting in April and continuing to the first hard frosts. This time of year it’s full of heliopsis, helianthus, rudbeckia, coreopsis, echinacea and dozens of other flowering perennials.

“The peak of the bloom was probably about three weeks ago,” Spangle said of the roadside garden she has created over 20-plus years. It blankets a long, steep hillside below her house, just north of Indian Trail Road and south of Flathead Valley Community College.

A wet June helped this year. All of the other gardens in her yard are doing well, too.

Spangle, who has lived in her house for 24 years, started the garden by planting a single row of flowers at the top of the hill. One day she asked her husband, Chuck, who died five years ago, if he would bring home some railroad ties and make a little ledge for the garden.

“Him and my sons, my son-in-law, my grandsons, everybody’s put in rocks or railroad ties or rebar into the hillside there,” Spangle said.

She planted that first ledge, and then a second as Chuck kept hauling home more railroad ties and rocks for her. He warned that eventually she would garden all the way down to the bottom of the hill.

“I never, ever dreamed it would go down there,” she said.

But she kept asking him to haul out more railroad ties and rocks.

He was happy to do whatever it took — haul stuff, fix sprinklers, mow — for her to let him do some fishing. And about 15 years later she found herself gardening at the bottom of the hill.

Also at her request, her son Darin built a Ten Commandments display out of etched marble and hewn logs. It’s on display in the flower garden, which has remained a labor of love and become something of a local landmark.

People admire the garden as they drive by. They also regularly stop to see the flowers up close or ask about them and take pictures.

One young woman asked if she could have her senior pictures taken in the garden. The answer was yes. Other people bring out their children to pose for a photo or two among the flowers.

Spangle even has caught a few people in the garden who stopped because they just couldn’t resist picking a couple of blooms for themselves.

“It doesn’t bother me as long as they don’t damage the flowers,” she said.

Spangle still does her weeding by hand, for fear of hurting the butterflies, dragonflies, ladybugs and hummingbirds that visit.

“That’s why I have a hard time spraying for weeds or anything else. I’m scared I’ll kill what I like,” she said.

Spangle gets excited about getting a good load of manure. One friend brought out some llama manure this year and she gave it a try and said she’d like to get more. Over the years she has lost track of all the different kinds of flowers she has planted.

This time of year, during the dog days of August, it’s tough to keep everything watered.

“My husband, all those years I never knew what my water bill was,” Spangle said.

“I’d just see him grimace when he opened the bill. Then after he was gone, I got the bill and I looked at it and said, ‘Oh, my ... Oh, my.’ I didn’t realize it was running that high.”

Spangle’s father also was a dedicated gardener.

But he only liked to grow food. She insists her thumb isn’t greener than anyone else’s. When one young man stopped by and kept talking about her green thumb she told him that she just plants the flowers. God blesses them.

“He said, ‘Yeah, God does the work.’ I said, ‘No, no, no. I do the work. God blesses it.’”

Spangle still works a few hours a week part time. But her gardens are a full-time job where the work is never done.

“It’s been a lot of fun. It just kind of feels good,” she said.

“I just think everybody needs something pretty and bright to look at because sometimes life gets a little difficult.”

Reporter Tom Lotshaw may be reached at 758-4483 or by email at tlotshaw@dailyinterlake.com.