For precious moments at a time, Jodie Fennessy could slough off the heaviness of illness by stepping outside the door of her family home in Claremont.
Although she’d always been a strong person, in her final years, Fennessy saw her quality of life steadily erode, diminished by a terminal brain cancer. Nature, as near as her personal fairy garden and as distant as the Nubble Lighthouse at Cape Nedick in York, Maine, provided a temporary reprieve.
In the summer of 2020, five years after her brain surgery, Fennessy found another retreat. Her daughter, Brittany Brooks, and granddaughter, then-7-year-old Molly, accompanied her first visit to Pumpkin Blossom Farm in Warner, where aromatic lavender fields and clucking chickens envelop the senses. Years later, it still bemuses Brooks to remember how her mother, it seemed, “already knew what she was doing.”
“She would pick out each little stem to bundle up together. She was really quiet; she would smell everything and take everything in for at least an hour every time,” Brooks said. “She would go sit on the bench. Molly was very patient.”
Fennessy passed away in 2023. Brooks said her mother never made her affinity for the lavender fields explicit in so many words — she didn’t have to.
“She meant a lot to a lot of people, and that place meant a lot to her,” Brooks said.
The farm has provided an oasis of serenity for a multitude of visitors since owners Missy and Mike Biagiotti opened their 14 acres to the public.
They support their business with every variety of lavender infusion, from candles and linen sprays that freshen living spaces to personal care products and all the accoutrements that elevate a beverage: lavender simple syrup, woven coasters and, more recently, lavender lemonades. But access to the lavender fields, to view and stroll through and commune with their beauty, never comes at any cost to visitors.
Nature is like medicine, the rare panacea touted for its preventative and palliative properties while warranting minimal disclosures about possible side effects, depending on how it’s experienced.
“It’s something I know works, I’ve seen it in action,” said Missy Biagiotti.
She remembers how her father would come home from work promptly at 4:15 p.m. and dig into all kinds of outdoor projects. When the time came to raise her own children in South Florida, Biagiotti felt the undeniable pull of her own childhood. She made it a priority to spend summers in New Hampshire, fishing and hiking in the Sunapee Region. Some days, her family would cluster in the threshold of their home and their three children would team up in a game of ‘left-right,’ guiding the day’s adventure with simple directions decided on a whim: one step to the left, another to the right, and eventually, they would arrive somewhere scenic and interesting.
But it was hardship that cemented Biagiotti’s belief in the remedy that surrounded her, the clean air that fills lungs with peace and empties them of worry, the meditative waltz of shadows and sunlight that focuses the overburdened mind on something bigger, steadier, more grounded.
In 2012, Biagiotti’s sister, Kelly, was diagnosed with Multiple Myeloma, a blood cancer that develops in bone marrow. It took time to find the right treatment center, but in February of the following year, Kelly underwent stem cell transfer at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston. Faithfully by her sister’s side for the duration of those delicate six weeks, Biagiotti can recall the chatter of the nurses’ station, the cacophony of beeping medical instrumentation, the constant stimulation of the environment they couldn’t escape.
“There was really no break from the lights and the noise,” Biagiotti said. Then, they took the elevator up to the Stoneman Healing Garden. “I remember vividly the sounds. The fountain trickling water, little subtle sounds. We took big deep breaths.”
She couldn’t replicate the indoor garden, designed by landscape architects, at her family’s farm, but she decided she could offer others a slice of reprieve that might help them along their own path.
“You carry this responsibility to them. They’re coming with a lot of heavy things on their shoulders,” she said. “We know this place is really special, and we’re happy to share it with other people.”
Bringing life, not destruction
The news that his year of service in one of Iraq’s most volatile regions would be extended by another six months walloped 23-year-old Greg Wortman. The fact that it arrived over CNN, his platoon bent over the television, rather than from a superior officer, only added insult to injury.
“Talk about a soul-sucking morale killer,” he recalled. The previous months had been anything but easy, as Wortman and the 19 soldiers subordinate to him trudged through the insurgent-riddled area south of Baghdad known as the ‘Triangle of Death.’ They built schools and provided community assistance. They also withstood raids and reacted to explosions and firefights.
Wortman and his brother had grown up simulating combat with their G.I. Joe figurines, and when he joined the armed forces, he felt self-actualized, but there was “a lot of shit they left off the recruitment poster.”
During their first 15 months in the warzone, between 2006 and 2007, 55 soldiers belonging to his brigade were killed. None of the soldiers in Wortman’s platoon were killed in action during that first stint, although as he prepared to reunite with those fellow servicemen on the 20th anniversary of their deployment in June, he recalled mournfully how some had died by suicide after coming home.
“You were dropped into a foreign country to do something you knew nothing about. Geopolitical tensions and tribal infighting? There are no college classes on that,” he said. “A lot of vets you talk to, they don’t seem phased by anything because you have to come to grips with death. […] It desensitizes you.”
When Wortman left the army at 32, having been deployed twice more during his nearly ten years of military service, he was forced to look inward. He does that still as he enters one of the six beehives in his backyard or the apiary at the Manchester VA Medical Center, wedged into a grassy ravine between the parking lot and the busy curvature of Smyth Road.
The center’s recreational therapists introduced a new queen into one of the hives in early May. Wortman, who started his beekeeping journey there five years ago and returns regularly to lend a hand, shielded himself with a protective suit, deactivated the electric fence around the hives and flourished his smoker around the hives to tranquilize the honeybees. He wouldn’t need to necessarily find the queen to determine whether she had been accepted by the hive; he only needed evidence of her survival.
Boxes, unstacked one by one, opened to reveal a catalogue of panels that Wortman handled with care, maneuvering the corners between his thumb and index fingers to avoid killing any bees with an accidental pinch. The landscape of a hive can be savage — whereas many people think the queen enjoys her domination, Wortman sees her as a slave to the perpetuation of the hive, laying as many as 2,000 eggs per day until she dies. He finds the new queen in the bottom box, and like a soldier having completed the objective of his mission, he begins to return the hive to its original configuration.
“I spent a lot of time overseas destroying things, on one side of the equation. And when I came back, I asked myself: ‘What would I do that I found joy in? How do I make the most of the time I have left?’ And it was nature,” he said.
Looking after bees doesn’t soften his unvarnished view of military service, but “time with nature helps to counter-balance it. I can make a difference growing things and regenerating things.”
Wortman has big aspirations for his backyard farm in Allenstown. Already, he has a commercial honey extraction line in his basement. He sells his honey directly to customers on Facebook and through an acquaintance’s store in Scituate, Mass. He hopes to grow his apiary from 6 to 50 hives, and he envisions his operation, Farm 310, becoming a nonprofit, employing veteran farmers and helping to mitigate food insecurity in the region.
“Will I get there? Probably not. But you do what you can, you do a little bit every day,” he said.
He knows farming isn’t profitable, but someday, he hopes it will pay dividends as an investment in his children’s future, particularly for his 16-year-old son, who has cerebral palsy and may depend on his siblings long after his parents are gone. Even now, the farm serves a purpose.
“Before gender integration, to ask for help was a massive sign of weakness. So many folks from that era were afraid to be seen as weak, and they lived on an island of isolation,” he said. “The longer you don’t deal with it, the longer you can’t live life to the fullest. For me, it’s been grounding.”
Filling your cup first
One day this summer, after the Blossom Hill Farm opens for the season, several dozen providers from Riverbend Community Mental Health will come together to decompress at Pumpkin Blossom Farm. Biagiotti provides everything they need — scavenger hunts, therapeutic crafts and permission to roam freely — taking some of the pressure off of organizers, like Amy Stultz, a psychologist with the organization’s Children’s Intervention Program.
Even so, Stultz makes a point of arriving early and leaving late, allowing herself a sliver of solitude to take in the lavender fields before the buzz of dessert competitions and raffles starts up.
Stultz is familiar with the idea of taking care of herself so she can better care for others; the workplace culture at Riverbend, where she’s built her career over the past 23 years, reinforces self-care often, given “the high level of absorption of people’s needs that we take on as therapists,” she said. She’s learned to stay as steady as possible for the sake of her patients, some of whom experience suicidal ideation or non-suicidal self-injury, and widened that practice to the outer reaches of her personal life.
When she received an unexpected diagnosis in 2021, forced by pandemic-era precautions to receive treatment alone, she drew on her professional training and the strength of that muscle — mindfulness — to carry on. And in the lavender fields, she lets that sense of presence, awareness, groundedness grow.
“If I’m at church, then I’m at church. If I’m with my kids or my family, then I’m with my kids and my family. And if I’m working, then I’m doing whatever I can do [to] be here, present with the people I’m with,” Stultz said.
The lavender fields fill Stulz’s cup so that, later, she might be able to pour out from it for others’ benefit. At lunch recently, she asked her colleagues what they got out of their trips to the farm. “It is a beautiful, relaxing environment where I can just exist without demands or pressures from work and enjoying community,” one provider’s response came later in the day.
“It’s really just a day of giving back to people who work really hard for other people,” Stultz said.
