Daisy (Goldschmid) Unsicker was born in 1976 on Daigle Road in Westminster where her mother Raine Kaine (her father is Tom Goldschmid.) had planted lovely perennial beds all around their home. Even before Daisy started first grade at the Westminster West School – where Claire Oglesby and this writer’s wife, Mary Hayward, were her teachers in grades 1-4 – she helped her Mom with flowers as well as their family’s large vegetable garden.
“I guess my parents could be called “back to the earth folks – growing, canning, freezing.” (She told me this as she ate her homemade soup from her last summer’s frozen veg.) We were sitting mid-April in the kitchen of Jack and Karen Manix at their Walker Farm in Dummerston where Daisy works from March to November.
After Westminster West School, Daisy attended The Grammar School in Putney for grades 5-8, then Putney School for grades 9-12 “and then I went to UVM to become an ESL teacher. That plan changed when I took a Botany class in 1996 and LOVED IT.
“That summer both my brother Alec (now a dry-stone waller) and I worked at Walker Farm. I worked in the stand selling fruits and veg. Then I met and talked with Amy-Melissa, a fellow worker and flower specialist, and she got me learning about garden plants and I haven’t stopped since. After that season at Walker Farm, I returned to UVM and took only horticulture classes that second year. I left UVM in 1997. I knew then plants were my future.
“In 1998 I asked Jack if I could work in “the back” propagating in the greenhouses. I then had all that knowledge from UVM. Jack agreed, and that’s what I’ve been doing here ever since. Later I started working with rare Fuchsias, rare Salvias and now a lot of succulents. I’ve worked mostly in one of the more than twenty greenhouses – mine is named Graceland. I started with Fuschias, foliage and house plants, succulents along with Euphorbia ‘Diamond Frost’ (our top selling single-variety annual), Calibrachoa……” (Google Walker Farm VT to see their website and plant lists.)
In the early 2000’s Joe Eck and Wayne Winterrowd, nationally known garden designers who had a ten-acre plus show-garden of rare and unusual plants just west of Brattleboro in Readsboro, wanted us to seed rare annuals. I did.
A while later Karen Manix, Daisy and I were in House #1 where Daisy was telling me about this greenhouse was where she propagates young plants from mature plants. Karen said “Oh, remember when that woman from California came in and showed us on her cellphone a picture of her sickly Prickly Pear Cactus and asked you, “How do I save this?’ You did.
Starting in the early 1980’s, this writer was a garden designer and starting to write research-based articles for Horticulture and Fine Gardening Magazines. (Over the next thirty years he published ten books, 100 magazine articles and had become a national lecturer on garden design. By 2023, when he retired, he and his wife Mary had developed a serious garden in Westminster West where hundreds and hundreds of Walker Farm plants grow today. In the 90’s and on, I was riding the same wave Walker Farm and Daisy were on. America was riding an English Garden craze. Over the 90’s into the next century, we solidified our gardening Declaration of Independence from England and became confident, even regional gardeners.
Daisy said, “It was such an exciting time! Garden symposia, Scaevolas, Petunias that don’t need dead-heading, annuals in perennials beds, ornamental grasses, and…. Even the NY Times published a full- page article on Walker Farm in 2004. For many winters, Jack and Karen flew to Washington State and environs year after year placing orders with growers. (It was the Daisys and the Manix’s -the propagators and nursery people- who fueled this national enthusiasm.)
“Oh, and then there’s the other love of my life, Neil Unsicker,” Daisy told me. “We met here in 2000 when he came to check in with a friend who did. I was hoeing corn and when leaving he asked me if, after work, I wanted to go fishing.” They went to the SIT pond.
Seven years later they married, bought 22 acres and built a rustic house. Much later they bought a home in a small town in Columbia in South America.
Jack and Karen buy in unusual and popular trees, shrubs, perennials to sell to hundreds of gardeners every day from early May until mid-October. They hire 40 people to help them every year. Daisy is in Graceland with her THOUSANDS of plants that will go out for sale when they’re ready. (To see their updated plant list, go to their website:walkerfarm.com.) There are twenty of us working in the 20 greenhouses propagating – one greenhouse 30’ wide x 100’ long just for 160 varieties of unusual tomato plants, including ‘Purple Calabash,’ Joe Eck and Wayne Winterrowd’s favorite. The are other houses for flowers, other for hanging baskets. ( ….. and another twenty employees hoeing crops and later picking beans and peas, corn….) Jack Manix told me Daisy takes cuttings from stock plants, roots them and we sell them. “Daisy can root a broomstick!”
After Walker Farm shuts down in November, Daisy, Neil and their dog Rio fly to their home in Colombia and live there for the winter. From the nearby hills, they launch their paragliders within view of the Andes Mountains, most days. But on March 1 each year since 1998, Jack Manix opens Graceland’s door and Daisy walks in for another season of propagation.
This is one of a series of some 30 profiles of working people from southern Vermont and adjacent New Hampshire that I wrote and then published in the Brattleboro Reformer newspaper every Friday from Jan 1 - May 30. Do the same with your local newspaper.