Glenn Canary Butterfly GardenButterfly Garden Designed by HandymanTeacher Hub KirkpatrickPR Newswire Mourns the Loss of Glenn Canary
I was doing gardening for a neighbor and the client (Patricia Canary) was watching me work. She asked me to stop by her place after finishing because she needed advice about a memorial garden she wanted to create in front of her condo and an adjacent condo.
When working on a garden, I like to talk to the folks involved and then think on it for a few days. Pat agreed that the plants already there should be removed and it was O.K. with her to prune the bushes back to a more manageable size. My first thought was to just fill the location with butterfly friendly plants and see if they would attract butterflies. I went to visit to my grandchildren up north while this discussion was going on. One morning I awoke and knew what I was going to do.
Pat and Glenn both had worked for PR Newswire for many years. A picture of the Butterfly Garden and a tribute to Glenn were featured on the 7,400 square foot digital billboard located in Times Square in New York City. We have included a shot of that. I have since also crafted a stained glass butterfly as a tribute to Glenn's memory which hangs outside of Pat's home. It is nice to know that when nice things are done in the world, they are paid forward!
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This Butterfly Garden is one of my greatest joys since I started doing Handyman work! Butterflies are the symbol of freedom and I have always felt a sign of life coming from and going back to eternity. 
Her neighbor's young wife had recently died of cancer but had told him that she would come back and visit as a butterfly. The neighbor's daughter bought a small butterfly statue and placed it in the front garden. This garden was a mess. It was filled with dying plants and overgrown bushes. 
With different colored mulches and border, I was going to make the garden in the shape of a butterfly. As you can see by the photo, I used red mulch for the butterfly and a green border. The rest of the area I filled with natural cypress brown mulch. 
Since a Monarch Butterfly has spots on its wings, I chose butterfly friendly plants and used a border to make the spots. Pat and Glenn were thrilled and we managed to surprise their neighbor and his daughter by covering the work each evening until the last day. The daughter and mother were to graduate from college on the same day. The college agreed to give the daughter her diploma and present her mother's diploma posthumously. The local news folks did a feature on the story and included shots of the garden. And that's not the end of the story. 
Months later, Pat's husband Glenn died suddenly of Pulmonary Fibrosis. This is also important because a butterfly is the symbol used by the Coalition for Pulmonary Fibrosis in that the butterfly represents the shape of both lungs in the body. For more information, please go to the
