Seed Drive Reflects Gardener’s Spirit. Sheila Grissett. Times-Picayune. August 9, 1994. New Orleans, Louisiana.

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Jim Donahoe was many things in life- a family man, a longshoreman, a poet and, most especially, a gardener who treasured the four-o’clocks he learned to love as a child in New Orleans.

Four-o’clocks were his passion. Donahoe died from cancer in his Metairie home April 6, just one week before his bushes began to open their small, trumpet-shaped flowers for the summer. Today, seed from those backyard bushes have been planted in an estimated 150 cities thanks to an ambitious letter-writing campaign by his son, Kevin Donahoe.

As the bushes grow, they will flower all summer in magenta, white and yellow buds, but never before 4 p.m., hence their name. The younger Donahoe picked the thousands of pea-sized seeds from his father’s garden and mailed them in packets of 10 to postmasters and governors in all 50 states. He asked that they be planted before July 17, the date of his father’s 66th birthday, both as a memorial to his father and as a surprise for his mother, Dot.

Not only were the seeds planted in every state, but his son is still being inundated with letters and proclamations from every state and dozens of cities.

One of the most touching was a handwritten note from Oklahoma Gov. David Walters, who told of losing both parents to cancer in the past seven months. “I will personally plant the seed,” the governor wrote to Donahoe.

Syracuse, N.Y., Postmaster Edward Phelan Jr. wrote of a postal service custodian who is so ill he can no longer plant the gardens at the office’s DeWitt Branch, serving the city’s eastern corridor. In his absence, the postmaster said, schoolchildren will plant this year. “Be assured,” Phelan wrote, “your father’s four-o’clocks will have a home in DeWitt.”

Some asked for more seeds to share; others gave progress reports on those already planted. “The seeds have sprouted and are growing fast under the 20 hours of Alaska sunshine a day,” said the postmaster of Anchorage.

Locally, Talen’s Nursery in New Orleans is selling seeds from Jim Donahoe’s garden with proceeds going to several charities, including the Cancer Association of Greater New Orleans and St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee.

Kevin Donahoe, a graduate of Tulane University who holds a master’s degree in communications from Northeast Louisiana University, said he asked postmasters for help because he figured they were his best bet for quick, national distribution. A second wave of seeds went out to First Families just because it seemed like a good idea at the time, Donahoe said, “I wasn’t prepared for the response. I am overwhelmed.”

Like his parents, Donahoe is a horticulturist. He developed the passion while piddling in his parents’ greenhouse. He is the vice president of the Louisiana Fern Society, and cultivates the bromeliads, African violets, ferns and orchids that now fill the greenhouse.

Donahoe remembers his father as a “simple man,” a man so modest that he rarely spoke of his membership in MENSA, a society open only to those who score at or above the 98th percentile on a standard IQ test.

“He always carried his MENSA card,” the son said. “He was so proud of it. He passed the test on his first try. Be he kept it quiet.”

Above all, Donahoe said his father hoped to be remembered as a poet, a man whose love of gardening was often reflected in his poems.

Among the many words Jim Donahoe left were these, titled:

Southern Spring

“Soon
I will borrow
a bow saw
to trim the yews
that run my yard,
and soon
I will hunt stakes
to brace my plants,
but now
I must sit
in the shade
and watch
the four-o’clocks grow."