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Nome’s Museum Director, Cheryl Thompson, typically spends her day organizing artifacts and welcoming guests, but her service to the community doesn’t stop at the end of the work day. During the spring and summer, she can be spotted gardening around town.
On a warm summer day, Thompson stood in the middle of a long row of large, rusted dredge buckets bordering Anvil City Square. She carefully planted pansy starts in one of the buckets—a massive remnant of Nome's gold mining past.
“All the buckets are so big, and there's so many that we usually try to get some perennials going. And perennials come back every year,” Thompson said as she worked a small trowel. “Here we've got these daisies that come back, and we usually put them in the front, and they help hold the dirt in, and they bloom all summer too, which is good.”
Thompson has been gardening since she left Nebraska as a young adult. In Minneapolis she had a backyard garden, then in Montana she gardened out in the country. In 1983 she came to Nome to work as a camp cook on the north side of Mt. Distin. She tried, but struggled, to start a garden that first foggy summer. Thompson said she got the gardening interest from her grandma.
“For me, there's something really therapeutic about it. I love having my hands in the dirt. I didn't really garden with my grandma, but she came from farm background, and somehow I absorbed a lot of qualities from her. I don't know, it’s just something in my blood, I guess you could say,” she said.
Thompson made the move to Nome permanent in 1984. She noticed several community members with successful gardens around town.
“Maynard Perkins was the gardening guru when I came here, and he had a greenhouse, and his yard was all, you know, poppies and all kinds of stuff. And he sold flower starts,” she recalled.
Thompson’s husband built her flower boxes and a lean-to greenhouse, but it took some time to figure out how to keep plants healthy in Nome’s sub-arctic climate.
“It was a big learning process. I dug down into the gravel pad to make the beds, you know, I didn't know about doing raised beds and the marigolds, the stems were red, the leaves were yellow. They just sat there and didn't grow,” Thompson said.
Eventually, she got the hang of it. Later though, the local gardening instructor left town, leaving Nome without gardening classes or plant starts for sale. The dredge buckets, once filled with colorful flowers, were growing weeds. So, Thompson and some friends began to fill in.
“That first year, though, we didn't know there was chickweed in those buckets. And so halfway through the summer, you know, you look at the things, and there's like a flower poking out here and there, and it's a mass of green, like, ‘Oh, whoops!’” she said.
From there, opportunities bloomed. Thompson acquired a larger greenhouse at her home and offered her first class through UAF Northwest Campus. Around that same time, a few groups got a grant to build a greenhouse at Nome-Beltz High School and her community class eventually moved there. That’s where her teaching really took root.
“It was the cutest thing. We got a ton of those number 10 cans from the jail, because they go through lots of canned stuff," Thompson recalled. "We planted radishes with the kids in them, and driving around town, you'd see their little can of radishes in the yard, like, Oh, I know where they were!”
Thompson was hooked.
“I love getting people having their hands in the dirt. It really gets a hold of some people,” she said.
Thompson’s know-how drew her into many projects over the years. Arctic Access, a local non-profit, asked her for ideas to use some funds for gardening. She helped build a greenhouse for the Little Sisters of Nome, a group of French nuns from the Little Sisters of Jesus community.
Thompson also helped build Nome’s first community garden. The funding didn’t cover everything, so Thompson organized volunteers and donations from Outsider’s Building Supply along with her husband’s small business. She said the crew even sourced some materials from the Nome dump.
“So we're putting that weather port frame up, and we're missing pieces," Thompson said. "He goes to the dump that next Saturday, and there is a whole other one just like it at the dump. So he gets that we finish up our project!”
Thompson was quick to acknowledge all the helping hands from over the years. She credited fellow gardener Angela Hansen for tending to the dredge bucket plants and local miner Kenny Hughes for making discarded soil available by the road.
And she sees potential in perhaps unexpected places, with ideas for more green spaces across town. Thompson is eyeing large, overturned tractor tires bordering Nome’s skate park for planting trees. She even has a plan for where to get the dirt.
“They've just dug up a whole bunch of dirt out of the new sewer and water project. And I saw that it's over here at the snow dump,” she said.
Thompson said one of the great things about small towns is, if you see a hole, you can fill it and start planting seeds.
