At the corner of First and Kincaid is a lovely little garden that serves as Mount Vernon’s floral harbinger of spring, and continues throughout the summer to cheer us with displays of seasonal blooms. For that you can thank the Tulip Valley Gardeners, a local non-profit organization whose Facebook page cheerfully describes it as “a group of people interested in gardening” who “meet once a month to share our love of gardening and some good food.” Personally, this is an agenda I can get behind.

A few years back, Mount Vernon Mayor Jill Boudreau asked the gardening club to take on the maintenance of the steeply banked garden site running along the west side of First Street, just across from City Hall. “You have to practically be a mountain goat to work on that garden,” club secretary Kathy Hansen said in a 2015 interview with a Skagit Valley Herald reporter.

Mayor Jill’s request was prompted by the garden’s state of neglect, and the Tulip Valley Gardeners rose to the challenge of restoring it. A mystery as to who might have been responsible for its former glory arose with the discovery of a stone marker found buried beneath the vegetation. A cryptically brief inscription on the marker, the size of a small headstone, consisted of just four words: “Emma Jarvis Memorial Garden.”

But who was Emma Jarvis? Despite the fact that her love of gardening was sufficient to have caused a memorial to her to be placed in the garden now tended by the Tulip Valley Gardeners, no one in the club had heard of her — so they reached out to readers of the Herald in the hope that someone in the community would remember her.

The gardening club’s efforts paid off. Several people, including relatives and former neighbors, came forward with information about Emma Jarvis, and the following biographical info emerged.

Emma Jarvis was born Emma Rosin on December 18, 1905, in Germany. She was of Russian descent. However it transpired, she ended up emigrating to the Skagit Valley where she married William Jarvis in 1930. The couple lived on Blackburn Road. Ann worked in the Cleveland Elementary School cafeteria and her husband drove a milk truck. They had a son, also named William, who at the time of a September 2015 Skagit Valley Herald article was living in Edmonds. Emma was active in the Floral Arts Garden Club and is remembered by her former neighbors for the beauty of her home garden as well as for the garden she helped maintain on First Street. In the 2015 Herald interview, Kathy Hansen noted that, “It was a magnificent garden when Emma had it. She had the garden sectioned off with boxwoods.”

Emma and her husband William died in an automobile accident on a foggy night in December 1967 while trying to cross I-5 at Hickox Road. Devastated by her tragic demise, her companions from the Floral Arts Garden Club named the First Street garden in her honor and placed the stone marker that would subsequently be obscured by time and vegetation — until uncovered by the Tulip Valley Gardeners, who had a larger sign erected to Jarvis’ memory.

We tend to think of history as being shaped by epic deeds performed by larger-than-life personages. The reality is that each and every one of us is involved in writing the story of who we are as a community. For the most part, our contributions (for good or ill) will at best become footnotes in a larger tale, likely to be forgotten with the passage of time.

But while all of us leave behind at least some memories, there are occasionally more tangible traces of our passage through this world. Perhaps, like the giant tulip poplar at the corner of Cleveland and Snoqualmie, it’s a tree that we planted — or in the case of Emma Jarvis, a garden she lovingly maintained with the help of friends who believed that they could make their community a better place by bequeathing a garden for subsequent generations to enjoy, long after the hands that tended it are forgotten. Thanks to the efforts of the Tulip Valley Gardeners, however, we now know who one of those pairs of hands belonged to, and I’ll never again pass by the garden on First Street without silently thanking Emma Jarvis for her part in making Mount Vernon a great place to live.