Facing troubles with deep roots

Charges swirl as Mass. Horticultural Society struggles to regain footing

Lincoln designer Carol Michener Card, while among the Spring Flower Show's creditors, says ''it's heart wrenching'' to see the organization in trouble. (Matthew J. Lee/Globe Staff)

Spring is usually a season of joy and anticipation for garden lovers, but this year, it was rife with suspicion and recrimination at the Massachusetts Horticultural Society.

Except for a well-received Spring Flower Show at the Bayside Expo Center in Boston, 2008 was off to a terrible start. The society had been borrowing heavily to pay its bills. Fund-raising was drying up. And the board of trustees was trying to figure out how to deal with revelations in the Globe that the society's new executive director, Bob Feige, had spent three days in jail during 2007 for failing to pay former employees of a business he once owned.

By summer, Feige had resigned. And since then, the society has frozen its business accounts and payments to creditors, reshuffled its board, and laid off 18 of its 30 staff employees, including the woman who has run the flower show, its signature event, for the past 12 years. Hoping to avoid canceling the Spring Flower Show in 2009, what would be its 138th year, the trustees are considering having a smaller event later in the season at the society's headquarters, the Elm Bank Reservation in Wellesley.

But how things got to this point is in dispute - a haze of charges and countercharges that seems as murky as the future of the nation's oldest horticultural organization itself.

According to Betsy Ridge Madsen, the new president of MassHort's board, the trustees took a close look at the organization's books in April when Feige was on vacation in Africa.

A review is still under way, Madsen said, but the bottom line was that the organization was essentially broke and facing a stack of bills with no way to pay them. Feige resigned, she said, after the trustees confronted him.

"The biggest problem is that our funds have been badly managed over the last few years and the budget process was not adequate," Madsen said. "People were spending more than they were raising and that simply doesn't work."

Feige, however, said that the trustees received detailed monthly reports about the organization's troubled finances, and that they were the ones who approved some $800,000 worth of borrowing over the past year.

Because he had been in the high-risk business of buying troubled companies and trying to turn them around before taking the job at MassHort, Feige said, he was an easy scapegoat for a board looking to cover up its own poor decisions and lack of fund-raising ability.

He was trying to clean up the mess, he said, and any suggestion that he was trying to hide anything from the trustees - a charge that he said has been implied by society leaders - is a "complete, unequivocal joke." He said an internal investigation cleared him of wrongdoing, but that he resigned anyway because the board wasn't behind him.

Passionate suburban gardeners in Massachusetts spend tens of millions of dollars every year on their hobby. The parking lots at some garden-supply centers look like they could be BMW or Volvo dealerships. So with all those potential deep pockets to dip into, how could MassHort possibly be broke?

"It's just very sad," said Carol Michener Card, a Lincoln landscape designer who won a gold medal for her "Sustainable Grace" display at this year's flower show, only to be told later that her $7,000 reimbursement from MassHort had been frozen. "I just believe in their mission so thoroughly and completely that it's heart wrenching to find out that they are having these kinds of troubles."

One thing on which insiders agree is that the organization's financial troubles predate the tenure of Feige, who became executive director last year after being a volunteer, adviser, and eventually a trustee.

According to Madsen, despite being a multimillion-dollar enterprise with thousands of loyal customers, more than $8 million in assets - including rare books and drawings worth millions of dollars - and a role as a key player in some of the Boston area's most treasured events and institutions, the society was run more like a suburban garden club.

A small group of "elites," she said, made most of the decisions with little outside input, even though they could have easily drawn on the expertise of scores of successful business executives and entrepreneurs on the Wellesley-based society's volunteer rolls, she said. As a result, its reputation for fiscal responsibility has taken hit after hit in recent years.

In 2002, MassHort was forced to sell $5.25 million in rare books and prints just to make ends meet. To do so, the state attorney general's office had to petition the state Supreme Judicial Court for permission on MassHort's behalf.

At the time, Attorney General Thomas Reilly's office also "strongly advised" the society to educate its trustees on proper business conduct and financial practices, said Jill Butterworth, a spokeswoman for current Attorney General Martha Coakley.

But MassHort's financial woes worsened. Eroding trust caused donations to wither, which in turn caused the group to miss a historic opportunity to create a magnificent "Garden Under Glass" - a project that could have become an instant landmark and the showpiece of Boston's new Rose Kennedy Greenway.

Instead, MassHort was relegated to a supporting role on the green space replacing the Central Artery, and had to settle for installing paths, flowers, and landscaping on three open-air parcels.

In a filing to the IRS for the year ending Sept. 30, 2006, MassHort listed revenues of $4.1 million - and expenses of nearly $4.3 million, including $1.91 million spent on that year's Spring Flower Show, listed as a "nine-day exhibition attracting over 120,000 visitors." According to the same report, the show generated $1.99 million in revenue for MassHort.

Madsen said that the society has again reached out to the attorney general for help, but Butterworth said that Coakley's office is limited in what it can do.

"It is not the Public Charities Division's role to serve as consultants for nonprofits in Massachusetts," Butterworth said.

Butterworth also said that the attorney general's office recently sent a letter to MassHort stating that the society, after already receiving one extension, had missed its deadline for filing nonprofit disclosure forms with the state.

Madsen, meanwhile, said that a decision on the fate of next spring's show is imminent, and that a report from the review of the society's finances will follow shortly.

The board of trustees is also considering alternate ways to come up with funds, including charging admission to the gardens at Elm Bank, which include a recently installed English garden by a renowned British landscape designer, Adrian Bloom.

Card, the designer from Lincoln who is still waiting for her reimbursement, said that she recently returned from a trip to England, and that charging for admission to luxury gardens was a well-established way to raise funds for garden groups.

MassHort needs to do something, she said, to bring its fund-raising and bookkeeping efforts into the modern age, and Elm Bank could play an important role.

"Years ago, there was a very old portion of Boston society that contributed to the Horticultural Society," said Card, who runs a design business called CMC Design/Trowel and Spade. "But they're dying off," and MassHort's leaders, she said, "haven't figured out how to get the Starbucks crowd to come in. Maybe they need a Starbucks there."

Board president Madsen said that what MassHort needs most now is greater transparency and better communication with existing and potential members, so that they can understand and monitor the society's efforts to become solvent.

"People are not going to give to an organization that is frittering away their money," she said. "It's going to be hard, because we have to build up our reputation again."