RIWPS Appreciates Its Volunteers!

It’s a challenge to summarize Dick’s many contributions to RIWPS since he and his wife Marty joined in 2007, after moving from Colorado where he had been a surgeon and she an English teacher, before launching a native plant nursery.

They brought those same skills East, where they propagated New England’s native species in an unheated greenhouse and their yard in Little Compton. 

As Dorothy Swift, who founded Seed Starters recalls, the Fishers’ yard became a native landscape filled with the perennials, shrubs and trees they propagated over the years, “contributing a generous bounty of native species” to the sales each year.

That bounty numbered in the thousands, says plant sale chair Sue Theriault: “If you have ever bought a bayberry, winterberry, sweet pepper bush, holly, some kind of dogwood – the list is long, it was probably grown by Dick.”

 Now, Dorothy is looking for about three RIWPS members who know how to grow woodies from seed, because “it’s going to take several volunteers” to fill his shoes.

Dick also served as WildfloraRI’s editor, and on its editorial team for many years, contributing many of his own writings, including On the Trail, Cultivation Notes and book reviews. His concise, accurate observations were touched with poetry, and often illustrated with one of his delicate drawings or watercolors. He loves the humble plants, from skunk cabbage to jewelweed, and opened our eyes to their subtle strategies for survival. 

Dick served as RIWPS president from 2016 to 2020, and for many more years as a board member. RIWPS legend Mary Lou Upham, who has worn every hat in the society, including watching our budget, will be ever grateful to Dick for finding Kate Leary, our CPA and bookkeeper.

It was Mary Lou who envisioned what took shape as “Entwined: Botany and Art and the Lost Cat Swamp Habitat, ”an exhibition at Brown University’s  John Hay Library, in Providence in 2019. It was the first time the public could view Edward Lewis Peckham’s original watercolors alongside specimens from the Brown Herbarium.

And it was Dick who “became a great partner,” Mary Lou says, in a unique collaboration between the Hay Library, Brown University Herbarium, Rhode Island Historical Society and the Rhode Island Wild Plant Society.

ReSeeding Rhode Island also thanks Dick for his astute thinking on the committee that started with a vision of growing and selling natives species truly adapted to the local environment. As botanist Shannon Kingsley collected the wild seed, and Rhode Island’s farmers began to grow it, Dick left the Ocean State – but continued to contribute to the project via Zoom.

ReSeeding Rhode Island Steering Committee, Sue Theriualt, could always tell “by subtle shifts in his expression how he was thinking,” and that thinking, now hundreds of miles away, has been invaluable to the project.

As longtime board member Susan Marcus put it, “Dick may be quiet, but when he speaks, he’s worth listening to.” And he’s quick to smile. Which we miss more than words can say.