The Daffodil Man

I’ve never met the Daffodil Man, but I’d like to thank him. Ronald Lee Fleming, a city planner and urban designer, was honored by members of the Alliance for a Livable Newport recently for his generosity and vision. Fleming is the man responsible for funding the Daffodil Project, in which more than 120,000 daffodils have been planted throughout Newport over the last seven years. As quoted last week by Sean Flynn of The Newport Daily News, Fleming envisions “a gold necklace from the city’s entryways right down to the water.”

As our communities asphalt and concrete and sprawl themselves into one homogenous, gray Blobville, we take pleasure in what little grace notes of beautification are left in the landscape. It improves the drive to Newport, for example, on a late March/early April day, to notice satellites of daffodil clusters streaking yellow at the Rotary, in the field along Admiral Kalfbus Road and next to two burying grounds on the aptly named Farewell Street. Somehow civilization doesn’t feel so drab when bulbs are in bloom.

A few daffodils at a time, Fleming has transformed Newport. His contribution to Newport’s charm is reminiscent of local heroes in other communities – such as the late Antoinetta Goodwin, better known in South County as The Chicken Lady, for the Rhode Island Red figures that adorned her automobile and mailbox along her Route 138 property. (Her son has carried on the chicken mailbox tradition, with the birds decked out in Red Sox garb or seasonal decoration, amusing commuters along the route that once connected Tower Hill to Little Rest.) Goodwin made it her mission to plant flowers in many of the roadside and rotary medians in the villages of South Kingstown, bringing color and a sense of tranquility to the increasingly noisy, suburbanized space.

People my age who grew up in Barrington may remember Karl Jones, who tended what was thought to be the country’s largest private rose garden at his property along Nayatt Road. Jones was a cranky, Yankee iconoclast, but his cultivated roses and landscape were beautiful, drawing visitors from around the world in June. Each year he donated his land to Barrington High School for a day, so the graduating class could hold its Friendship Service on the grounds, while the roses were in bloom. When he became too old to take care of the garden, he approached the town for help, hoping his flowers, with a little care and tending, would have new life in posterity. Barrington balked. Jones sold to private developers. The property was split up and turned into a cul-de-sac of homes with an address of Jones Circle. A trellis with a few thorny vines is all that remains visible to the public along Nayatt Road, an echo of what once was the town’s quirkiest and most beloved attraction.

So Barrington lost its rose paradise, and much of its character and charm in the process. Newport is still building its Brigadoon of daffodils. If it takes a village to raise a child, perhaps it takes a villager who sees the world with the eyes of a child to save it.

What would be one way to transform an ugly part of Rhode Island?