By Gretchen Keiser

Visitors to the riverside grounds of Ignatius House find a series of descending decks overlooking the Chattahoochee, flowering trees and shrubs, and landscaped areas, that invite quiet reflection.

The Jesuits point out that this beautiful appearance represents several years of continuous hard work and the generosity of a number of people, especially chief volunteer gardener Dolly Tuttle.

“I’m very much of a gardener and an outdoors person,” Mrs. Tuttle, a St. Jude’s parishioner, said, self-effacingly. “I could be sitting anyplace and see a weed and it would call my name.”

Mrs. Tuttle must have heard a chorus of voices in her early visits because, for wont of funds and workers, the grounds had grown at will for quite awhile. “I saw a lot of potential and started doing things a little bit at a time. One thing led to another.”

Without a gardening budget, the changes that have been wrought are overwhelming. Her first idea, a “Campaign for Growth” that invited people to donate funds for a tree or azalea in memory of a loved one, or to celebrate a special event, led to a number of donations.

A frequent visitor who was struggling with terminal illness, John Chernoski, often talked to the Jesuits, visited the Trinity bookstore and then would walk down to the banks overlooking the river to reflect.

After his death, his wife, an architect, designed and contributed the funds for a series of descending decks over the river and landscaping leading to the deck as a memorial to her husband. Mrs. Tuttle later embellished the area with rhododendron and impatiens.

“The next thing I did was put in an iris bed,” Mrs. Tuttle recalled. “That began with somebody wanting to get rid of some iris,” from their yard.

She admits her landscaping instinct has sometimes been overwhelmed by the challenge.

The late Helen Donnelly, who ran Trinity bookshop, “was always a real cheerleader for me,” Mrs. Tuttle says. “When Helen died, I put in the butterfly garden for her outside where her office used to be. I knew that was something she would love.”

Now it is difficult to reconstruct what happened when, but another project was to reclaim an area near the Jesuits’ residence that needed to be cleared of debris. The Catholic Singles group from the Cathedral of Christ the King came out and cleared and built up an area for her to landscape. Named for the late Jesuit author and speaker, Father Anthony DeMello, it became DeMello Park.

Eagle Scouts assisted in constructing new steps down to a waterfall below the Jesuits’ residence. Along the way a gazebo area was re-landscaped. Some trees, shrubs and benches were donated as memorials. Others Mrs. Tuttle purchased herself.

“I would much rather buy a tree than a dress,” she commented. “I would much rather wear jeans and a sweatshirt.”

The death of another Atlantan, St. Jude’s parishioner Clarence Nicpon, led her to plant a dogwood tree and surround it with flowers in his memory and call it “Clarence’s Corner.”

When Clarence’s wife, Arlene, visited and found the spot, she was so moved that she contributed a gift to Dolly’s landscaping work. Mrs. Tuttle was stymied in her first response, which was to dedicate an area to Mary, with an appropriate statue.

After some frustration she went and sat in “Clarence’s Corner’ and prayed about what to do. Then she walked down to the waterfall, crossed the bridge over the stream and looked back up at the area. She quickly saw in her mind’s eye a statue of the Risen Christ filling a spot on a rock outcropping overlooking the waterfall. “I thought, ‘This is perfect.’”

She later found an Italian-made statue in a catalogue and selected it, with Mrs. Nicpon’s approval, for the memorial.

There is a story behind every statue, it seems. Our Lady of the Smile, a beautiful Marian statue alongside the retreat house, was Mrs. Tuttle’s gift after she received the proceeds from the sale of a racehorse, Homebuilder, in which she held one-fortieth of a share.

After she began to volunteer in programs working with persons with AIDS, Mrs. Tuttle added several memorials for several PWAs who died, although not in an isolated area. “At the time, there was so much bigotry, I didn’t want them to be isolated, separated, because they already are. I happen to love my PWAs. I am very maternal, very protective of them.”

Finally, four small decks, called “pods,” have been donated to the grounds by friends of Father Larry Hein and called “Heinsights.” They are located along the path below the residence to the waterfall.

Mrs. Tuttle has recently stopped her extensive gardening because arthritis made the work difficult, but she says the opportunity to work in a “gigantic, 20-acre playground” as a gardener was a “very joyful, healing experience for me.”

“I’ve always said these grounds are very holy,” she observed. While busy Riverside Drive hums with traffic above, in the wooded area below there are niches of silence and prayer. Her hope has been that she and others can “take the peace, the serenity and the presence of God I felt on the grounds and take that out into the busy world.”