The wonder of growing Man's dream blooms from tragedy

The wonder of growing Man's dreams blooms from tragedy

David Joyner STAFF WRITER
3 August 1995
Atlanta Journal and Constitution

Plagued by the painful memory of his sister's murder, Sheldon Fleming turned to gardening. During every spare minute - after work and on the weekends - he landscaped his father's yard into a small slice of paradise.
A plum tree was planted in the family's fruit garden in his sister's honor.
This year, as Fleming brings to the community the tool that helped him survive, the memorial arbor is bearing its fruit for the first time. And now Fleming is hoping to share with the community the tool that helped him survive. "Wonderland Gardens" could be planted on 20 acres that were once the Mathis Dairy - on Rainbow Drive near South DeKalb Mall - as early as this fall. Fleming's brainchild, the community garden will bring youth together with senior citizens to grow vegetables and wildflowers.
"I knew it would eventually come," said his wife, Deborah Fleming. "He has always talked of his visions and his ideas of how people are when they're outside."
The program will help to guard schoolchildren and urban youth from the ills that plague their generation, YMCA administrative assistant Libby West said.
West, who grew up on a farm, is involved in the group effort to create Wonderland Gardens.
"You just can't be violent - you just can't hold a gun and plant a seed and watch it grow," she said. "The two are just in conflict with each other."
On Feb. 26, 1987, Sheldon Fleming's sister, Kelly, was raped, robbed and murdered in a case that still has not been solved.
Sheldon and Kelly were close. They worked together at Fleming's Tropical Gardens, a nursery owned by their retired father, Samuel Fleming.
A basketball star, Kelly was the best shooter in a family with three athletic boys, Sheldon said.
She hit 89 percent from the free-throw line for the DeKalb College- South Campus team; she also played as a Lady Eagle at Columbia High School.
At 6:30 on the evening she died, Kelly went to get some ice cream. When she didn't return immediately, Sheldon thought she might be out with friends.
"The evening just passed by so quickly," he remembered.
At 1 a.m., the police knocked on the Flemings' door. Kelly had gotten the ice cream but never made it back home.
Kelly was found dead, tied up in her father's van.
The NAACP and governor's office both contributed to a reward fund, Sheldon said, but the killer was never found.
"Kelly was the type," Sheldon remembers, "she didn't care whether you had a quarter or a million dollars."
The pain, Sheldon said, spun like a spider's web, affecting everyone who knew his sister.
"This just didn't touch my life," Sheldon said. "It did touch a lot of people's lives." The tragedy took its toll on Sheldon's mother.
After the murder, Deborah Fleming would drop by to visit and talk with her mother-in-law for hours.
"That was what she needed," Deborah said. "But you could see that who she needed was not there."
Sheldon's mother died in her sleep three years after Kelly's death.
In 1988, the year after Kelly's death, Samuel Fleming bought a small, spring-fed lake on 10 acres of land near the South River.
He built a home there, in the middle of a neighborhood where houses range from the old, run-down and forgotten to the new, lavish and luxurious.
It's a generational community, Sheldon explains, where grandmothers and cousins live next door to sons and aunts. Sheldon, a landscape architect and garden enthusiast, helped to shape the land into a resort for his father.
Concrete and stone steps lead to finely manicured grass. Beside the lake, grapevines wrap around a trellis.
Blueberries grow in a fruit garden, along with the plum tree planted in honor of Kelly.
Painted white, blue and gray, wood benches and chairs stretch under a shelter on the side of the lake opposite the house. Sometimes the Flemings throw parties, Sheldon says, with live jazz and lots of friends.
Three small boats bob on the green water by a small, wooden dock. Catfish the size of small children race under them.
The lot, Sheldon explains, is a metaphor for the changes that went on within him.
After finding Buddhism, he realized a connection with nature. Digging, planting, watering and hammering, Sheldon rebuilt himself.
The inspiration for Wonderland Gardens came, Sheldon says, when he was working in his father's yard.
He met with his childhood friend, Michael Davis, who worked with youth at a nonprofit agency in Connecticut.
Sheldon's experience with community gardens grew from his work at the Cooperative Extension Service's Urban Gardening program and Atlanta's parks bureau.
One Sunday last September, Davis, Sheldon and Bettye Ludd - a special-events planner - gathered at the lake.
Brainstorming for most of the day, the three envisioned a project to team youth with senior citizens in a community garden.
The result was Wonderland Gardens. Conceptualized in a 22-page document, the project is slated to begin as early as this fall on land that once was the Mathis Dairy.
Libby West put Sheldon in contact with Ariel Williams, director of the Soapstone Center for the Arts in south DeKalb.
Planning a cultural center for the old Mathis land, Soapstone is looking for groups to share the spotlight.
Wonderland Gardens, Williams said, fits right in.
Bringing together a fruit garden in honor of Kelly, community- planted patches, a demonstration area and a place for storytelling, the gardens will also emphasize cultural diversity, Sheldon said.
The group has planned festivals celebrating the fauna of different regions of the world, complemented by demonstrations inside the center.
Memberships, admission fees and charges for taking flowers and fruits out of the garden will help to raise money, according to the overview draft.
Private contributors, Ludd said, have helped as well.
Those who have seen Sheldon's work at his father's home attest to his ability.
Davis saw Samuel's land in its infancy, before it was developed. Back then, it was just another lot.
But, near its completion, Davis said his reaction to the landscape was intense. It's a response, Sheldon says, shared by many visitors.
"There's a lot of love there," Davis said. "Kelly's spirit is certainly there. . . . There is really something in nature above what's pedestrian in life."
For more information, call 288-0142.