For Steven and Roberta Keenholtz, gardening isn’t just a hobby. It is a creative expression that feeds their souls and their community.
Tucked away on Whittier Road, the couple’s one-and-a-third-acre property is home to a hyper productive vegetable garden and a curated backyard ecosystem complete with ornamental flowers, fruit trees, berry bushes, shrubbery and an antique fountain. Each side of the house has a uniquely curated landscape of plants.
“There’s always something flowering,” Steven Keenholtz said as he climbed a staircase up a hill made of stones wedged into the soil.
The staircase, lined with broad-leaf plants and flowers, leads to what he calls his Zen spot, a paved platform where he can relax on a bench and take in his hard-earned green space. To the left of the bench, a bare rocky ledge protrudes from the dark soil. Steven said it was an intentional decision to retain the character of Marblehead, which is “notorious for ledge.”
When the couple moved to this property 40 years ago, there was very little curated landscaping.
The hill that is now host to Steven’s Zen spot and hundreds of ornamental plants was a wooded former dump. With the help of a landscape architect, they transformed the space into what it is now.
Steven now serves as the landscape architect of sorts, while Roberta is the self-described “sous-chef.” They introduce new plants to the space, uproot species when they begin to take over, and are continuously weeding.
“It is backbreaking work to pull out all of the roots, and it’s a fulltime job,” he said.
They don’t always agree, Roberta said, like when Steven decided to uproot many of the lilies of the valley as they began to crowd out other species two years ago.
“That is, until she sees the finished product,” Steven joked.
The couple does agree, however, that the crowning jewel of their property is the vegetable garden.
Hundreds of different vegetables grow within the boundaries of their vegetable garden, including a dozen different herbs, squashes, greens, beans and radishes and astonishingly, 30 different species of tomatoes.
The couple originally started every vegetable in their garden from seed, though many of the plants are perennials and come back on their own each year. Each year, Steven plants the garden so that it produces all year, even erecting tents over the beds in the winter to allow the leaks, spinach, Swiss charr and kale to continue to grow.
“My grandchildren think it’s like Market Basket,” Steven said, laughing.
In addition to their own grandchildren, the couple welcomes neighborhood kids and their friends’ grandchildren to visit and pick raspberries. Nearly every guest leaves their homes with a bag full of produce.
In a sense, the boundaries of the garden are fluid. The couple used it to kickstart other green spaces such as the garden at the nearby Epstein Hillel school.
The couple created a garden at the school from scratch, beginning with Steven’s rotatiller which tilled the soil. Students helped turn over the soil and plant seeds and clippings donated from the Keenholtz garden.
“That’s the beauty of a garden,” Steven said.
Every year, the Keenholtz garden produces two yards of compost and ships some over to the school.
Additionally, each year, the Keenholtz participate in the Driftwood Garden Society’s dig and divide, where they donate plants to help raise funds for the organization which maintains the grounds of the Abbot Library.
The couple also uses their produce to make a variety of craft goods including basil pesto, tomato sauces and green and red salsa. The operation has expanded so much that the couple has four freezers in the house, one designated especially for their products.
“Those make great gifts at medical appointments and things like that,” Roberta said.
Roberta said her husband’s green thumb is decades old.
Before moving to this property in 1986, the couple lived on Pickwick Road, where they had a small area in their backyard where they could garden. So, Roberta bought her husband a book called “Square Root Gardening” by Mel Bartholomew.
“He read the book, and we plotted. It was a small little area…but he started in March and would rotate the crops, and we had vegetables through December,” Roberta said.
Steven Keenhotz’s next project is to work on the hostas, which grow at the base of a tree to the side of the house.
With a hori hori (a special kind of knife) Steven carefully digs and divides the plants so that one can grow from the roots of another that has matured enough.
“It’s always a work in progress,” he said. “You’ll come back in three years, and these will hopefully be full.”
