Watercolor Portrait of Maria Moreira for Tower Hill Botanic Garden

I was so excited to be commissioned to paint the extraordinary Maria Moreira’s portrait for Tower Hill Botanic Garden’s Horticultural Heroes Exhibit. The exhibit was on display at Tower Hill until May of 2019, and then the exhibit and interpretive material became a traveling exhibit lent out to other public gardens and horticultural venues.

Back in the 1980s, before my husband and I married, we would drive out on Route 117 to visit his family in Lunenburg every few weekends. My favorite part of the road was where 117 crossed from Harvard into Lancaster. Trees lined the road as it passed over the Nashua river, through marshland and fields. Over the years, I would sometimes see people wearing conical straw hats out in the fields. Almost forty years later, I would realize the people I saw in the fields were immigrants farming the over fifty acres of the Flats Mentor Farm.

Maria Moreira and her husband were dairy farmers in Lancaster when a young Hmong Chinese immigrant asked to use a small part of their dairy farm. The young woman wanted to grow food for her family. Moreira (herself an immigrant from Portugal) readily agreed, and over the next decades, the number of Hmong farmers working the land increased to fifty. African immigrants joined the program, and now make up approximately 80 percent of the plus 250 immigrant and refugee farmers farming at Flats Mentor Farm.

In 2010, Ms. Moreira established World Farmers, a nonprofit organization that supports and educates small, immigrant farmers in sustainable agriculture. Some of the farmers grow foods just for their families, others grow more to sell at farmer’s markets throughout the state.

When I heard that I’d been chosen to paint her, I started sketching different compositions, all vertically oriented as portraits usually are. The woman is an accomplished speaker and presenter, has received awards from the White House, and she has elegant taste in clothing. But the coolest thing about her that I could see was her generosity and work ethic, and the place that she had made and that had made her was the Flats Mentor Farm. So I stuck her out in the field we had driven by so many times. It was winter when I started the painting, so I needed to use reference photos to figure out some of the plants.

I considered including some of the farmers of Flats Mentor Farm in the background, but in the end I wasn’t comfortable painting people I hadn’t permission from. And I also didn’t want to detract from having Ms. Moreira as the focus of the painting.

As a writer, I couldn’t help but think what a inspirational and interesting children’s story Maria Moreira’s life would make. But it wasn’t until later I was almost finished that I realized that the landscape composition I eventually settled on would make a great book jacket!

Tower Hill Botanic Garden is the home of the Worcester County Horticultural Society. The gardens, fountains, hiking trails, and buildings are surrounded by the lovely hills of Central Massachusetts. Tower Hill has events all year round.

https://www.telegram.com/item/20190303/lancaster-farm-founder-part-of-tower-hill-exhibit