Polly Hill, 100; defying odds and climate, she grew trees

When Polly Hill was 14 and growing up outside Philadelphia, a fortune teller read her palm and told her she would live to be "99 and a quarter." She took him at his word and started a new career at the age of 50, when she founded the widely known Polly Hill Arboretum in West Tisbury on Martha's Vineyard.

"With that much time ahead of her, she was encouraged to accomplish all that she did and set an example to other women whose children were grown," said her daughter, Louisa Spottswood Coughlin of Philadelphia.

Mrs. Hill outlived the prophecy. She died of heart failure April 25 in the health center at Cokesbury Village, a retirement community in Hockessin, Del., where she had lived more than 20 years. She was 100.

A summer resident on the Vineyard since childhood, Mrs. Hill described the island as "horticulturally impoverished" compared to her home state of Delaware, her daughter said, and she decided to do something about it.

What she accomplished was considered a breakthrough in the horticultural world. She found that by planting seeds rather than cuttings, it was possible to grow in New England trees and shrubs indigenous to warmer climates.

She proved that by growing camellias, Southern magnolias, and other exotic trees among the 2,000 plant varieties on 25 acres of a 70-acre former sheep farm that has been in her family since 1926. The magnolias, cherry trees, and camellias are in bloom now.

Mrs. Hill began growing new plant varieties at her summer home in 1958, according to a 1998 Globe story, using seeds from all over the world. Through her trademark perseverance and some ingenuity in the late 1990s, she was able to grow 73 Champion Trees, the designation given to the largest example of a species in New England.

With some help from gardeners, Mrs. Hill planted the seeds as she tooled around the arboretum in her bright yellow golf cart, a petite woman in a rumpled hat and gardener's garb.

Even trees and plants that Mrs. Hill started as cuttings responded to her green thumb. In 1959, she planted a cutting of a Dawn Redwood she had received from Longwood Gardens in Delaware, said Tim Boland, the arboretum's director. The tree is now the tallest in the arboretum at 70 feet, he said. Two runners-up, at 60 feet each, are a tulip tree and a Nordmann fir.

Mrs. Hill was also known for the scientific records she kept dating back to the 1950s: a "live file" of successes and a "dead file" of failed plant experiments, which are still used by research botanists.

Although she was a modest woman who initially did not want the arboretum named for her, Mrs. Hill and her exploits did not go unnoticed. In a 1997 CBS broadcast, Harry Smith described her as "a national treasure." Newspapers dubbed her "the tree lady." Her grandchildren, for whom she has named many of the plants in the arboretum, called her Winkie, for Winkie Country, a division of the fictional land of Oz, distinguished by the color yellow.

The Julian Hill Magnolia with its 12-inch flowers is named for her husband, an inventor and a chemist who died in 1996. A son, Joseph, of Radnor, Penn., said he gets teased about the description of the azalea his mother named for him, "an outstanding low creeper."

She never named a plant for herself.

Her granddaughter, Lydia of Boston, recalled riding in Mrs. Hill's golf cart "with two garbage cans filled with water for the plants."

"She taught me the difference between poisonous and non poisonous mushrooms," she said. "The ones that will kill you very quickly are the ones that have a little skirt under the mushroom. The ones that didn't have a skirt, she would take a little nibble of it and say, 'If I'm sick by dinnertime, don't put it in the salad.' "

Mrs. Hill's independence inspired another granddaughter, Susannah Doherty of Chatham, N.J., "She didn't worry about what was expected of her and followed her dream."

She was born Mary Louisa Butcher in Ardmore, Pa., a suburb of Philadelphia, and was one of six children of Philadelphia stockbroker Howard Butcher, Jr. and Margaret Keen Butcher.

Her brother, W.W. Keen Butcher of Philadelphia, recalled her as "always both an optimist and a realist."

Keen Butcher said their parents bought the farm in West Tisbury in 1926 as a summer place. "The house had three barns and an outhouse," he said. "It was not cultivated. We grew grass, which was sent to a dairy farmer to feed his cattle."

Growing up, his sister rode horses, played tennis and field hockey, and was surrounded by woods, he said.

For five years she attended the Phoebe Anna Thorne Open-Air School for Girls in Bryn Mawr, a school without walls and covered by a pagoda roof. In winter, the girls kept on coats and gloves.

She graduated with a major in music from Vassar College at Bryn Mawr in 1928 and worked for a year in Tokyo teaching English and field hockey at a girl's college.

A friend introduced her to Julian Hill. They were married in 1932 and settled in Wilmington, Del., headquarters of the DuPont Co. He was an organic chemist and one of the team that discovered nylon in the DuPont experimental laboratory in 1932.

Gardening was always part of Mrs. Hill's life. Her daughter recalled that her mother had a victory garden during World War II and grew vegetables "on public ground a mile away."

"She commuted by bicycle with a wooden box fastened over the rear wheel carrying her youngest child," she said.

Mrs. Hill had only one regret, she told her granddaughter, Lydia: "The things I haven't done."

In addition to her son , daughter, brother and granddaughter, Mrs. Hill leaves another son, Jefferson of Washington, D.C.; four other grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.

A memorial will be held at 10 a.m. tomorrow at Cokesbury Village. Another will be held on Martha's Vineyard in the summer.