A gardener’s gift reflects God’s ever-growing goodness and beauty in the world
A member of St. Thomas Aquinas Parish in Indianapolis, Bill Scott has turned his north side Indianapolis backyard into a bountiful garden, sharing its harvest of vegetables with people in need at the nearby Boulevard Place Food Pantry. (Photo by John Shaughnessy)
By John Shaughnessy
A wondrous gift comes from working in a garden—an act of creation that adds a touch of beauty through the flowers and plants that grow there.
In a small yet special way, a gardener mirrors God’s gift of creating so much natural beauty and wonder in the world—a gift he wants people to embrace, treat with care and share its bounty.
So, a friend brings a bouquet of flowers from her garden. A neighbor shares tomatoes and zucchini he has grown. And then there’s the approach of Bill Scott, a member of St. Thomas Aquinas Parish in Indianapolis, who represents the life-giving spirit of many gardeners and farmers across the archdiocese.
At 78, Scott has created an overflowing crop of beans, peppers, collards, onions, carrots, eggplants, garlic, lettuce, tomatoes, potatoes and turnip greens in the backyard of his north side Indianapolis home—a buffet of bounty that produced 363 pounds of free produce last year for the nearby Boulevard Place Food Pantry of the Society of St. Vincent de Paul.
At the same time, he’s one of the four leaders of a nearby community garden known as SHarP (Shared Harvest Project), which contributed about 500 pounds of produce in 2023 to help Boulevard Place provide fresh vegetables to people in need.
Still, Scott’s story goes far beyond the harvest numbers which are on pace again this year.
He’s a research professor at Indiana University in Indianapolis, whose own college experience led him to fall away from his Catholic faith before he came to an understanding and an appreciation that science and faith complement each other.
He’s also the son of a woman whose love of gardening led to his own embrace of how God’s abundance has blessed the world—and makes him strive to do the same.
And even as Scott is often content working alone in his garden, he’s equally focused on his need for the gift of community, including the people he meets at the food pantry and the drivers and the passengers he interacts with on the bus he rides to and from work.
Like the morning glory flowers waiting to open in the early hours of a new day, those details of Scott’s story will unfold soon enough, but right now it’s important to focus on the difference that the efforts of Scott and so many others make in the lives of people in need.
‘What better mission is there?’
As the director of Boulevard Place Food Pantry, Matt Hayes sees the efforts of Scott and others as important on two levels—health-wise and faith-filled.
“When a person comes into the food pantry, it’s really important that they feel like they’re in a small grocery store—and fresh produce is the essence of that,” Hayes says. “When people don’t have funds to buy groceries, it’s really awesome for them to get fresh, nourishing produce.
“Honestly, the pantry only works because of what individuals give. The variety that is there is because of the donations from individuals. In the growing season, Bill is in almost every day, bringing something. His commitment and generosity are without question. For years, the work of the SHarP Garden and Bill has just been really wonderful.”
That gift also reflects the essence of the Catholic faith, according to Hayes.
“As a Catholic community that’s been trying to revive an awareness and a devotion to the Eucharist, I think the Eucharist is about sharing bread figuratively and literally,” Hayes says.
“That’s the heart of who we are as a Catholic community—we come together, and we break and share bread in the name of Jesus. And that’s what happens at a place like the food pantry.”
Hayes points out that a picture of The Last Supper graces one wall of the food pantry. On another wall is a picture depicting Christ’s miracle of the loaves and the fish. He believes both scenes form the foundation of the current third year of the National Eucharistic Revival.
“The third year is all about mission,” Hayes says. “What better mission is there than to take some food that you have available to you that you don’t need and give it to somebody who needs it?”
That’s what Scott has been doing for the past 20 years, embracing that foundation of the Catholic faith, the faith that he left in college.
‘A great appreciation for God’s presence in creation’
“As a Catholic, I kind of wandered away from the Church when I was in college,” Scott says as he sits in the front porch of his home. “I was a scientist, and I was thinking very much along the rational line of how things were put together—to the extreme point that it’s very deterministic. Which was very depressing actually.”
That viewpoint changed when he read the works of Thomas Merton, a Trappist monk, and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a French geologist, paleontologist, philosopher and Jesuit priest who wrote the book, The Phenomenon of Man.
“Teilhard de Chardin helped give me a model of somebody who could be both a scientist and a faith-filled person,” Scott says. “He helped me understand that there’s a much bigger reality and that God could be part of that. He and Thomas Merton had a great appreciation for God’s presence in creation and as a visible exemplification of God’s action in our everyday lives.
“That’s very powerful to me. And it led to my understanding and appreciation of the connection between the things I grow and how the whole process works—and how God is present in those things.”
That awareness has tied into another powerful influence in Scott’s life—an influence from his childhood in the Philadelphia area where he grew up with his three siblings in a “loving, very supportive family” led by his two parents.
“We were financially never stressed,” he recalls. “I had unearned abundance. As long as I can remember, I’ve felt both a responsibility and a pleasure in giving back. That’s true in gardening, and it’s true financially, and it’s true in my talents. I feel I’ve got this precious gift that was unearned, and I have a responsibility to give back. It’s not a burden.”
Instead, he asserts, it’s always been a blessing, especially in the varied ways it has connected him to the gift of community.
The ‘Tony Soprano’ tomato and other stories
“I love talking to the people who come to the food pantry. I love their smiles,” Scott says, flashing his own smile. “I love their stories of what they’re doing with the produce, and their appreciation. That’s a reinforcement.”
He has his own bounty of stories, including a potentially awkward situation involving a neighbor he once saw at the food pantry.
“He was there getting food. I know him quite well,” Scott recalls. “It could have been an embarrassing situation, but it wasn’t. So now I just go visit him and bring him some collards.”
His stories soon turn to the people he has met on the bus through the years, in his path to and from work on IndyGo’s 28 route.
“When I ride the bus, it’s one of my ways of getting out into the world, getting comfortable with being around people, learning a little about people,” he says. “If you’re a frequent rider on the bus, you get to know your fellow passengers and the bus drivers. I’ve had wonderful interactions.
“One day, I got on the bus and one of the passengers beckoned me over and said, ‘I’ve got some seeds for you.’ The bus goes by the SHarP Garden, and she’s seen me there. She had a special tomato variety she called ‘Tony Soprano.’ I took those seeds and planted them in the SHarP Garden and my garden and renamed them ‘IndyGo Number 28’ because that was the bus route.
“Another time, a bus driver had seen me gardening. He gave me seeds that he had gotten from a relative. He didn’t know what they were and asked me if I could grow some for him. I grew a number of plants for him, and I brought them to him as I got on the bus. His smile was great. I love that. It makes me feel very secure and that I’m not alone. Just very reinforcing.”
‘A wonderful community of people’
Scott is the first to acknowledge that he’s not alone in the overall effort of the Boulevard Place Food Pantry to help people.
He praises the dedication of the three other leaders of the SHarP Garden—Mary Ellen Gadski, Candase Cornett and Brooke Southerland—and he notes how the garden gets help from members of the Common Ground Christian Church, right across the street from St. Thomas Aquinas Church.
He sees the impact of donations, fresh produce and non-perishable items from people in five Indianapolis North Deanery parishes—Christ the King, Immaculate Heart of Mary, St. Joan of Arc, St. Luke the Evangelist and St. Thomas Aquinas.
Scott also knows the list of contributors goes on and on, including some of the vendors at the weekly Broad Ripple Farmer’s Market who donate their unsold produce to the pantry.
And as he strolls through his backyard of plots filled with vegetables, he proudly points out the flower beds that his wife Helene tends, noting how her flowers often grace the area in front of the altar of St. Thomas Aquinas Church.
They’re all parts of what Scott describes as “a wonderful community of people.”
He views their part and his part as humbly trying to fulfill Christ’s call for people to care for each other, to care for the world God created.
“In the literal sense, it’s feeding the hungry,” Scott says. “It’s also witnessing and teaching about God’s abundance and his presence in creation—and how wonderful and beautiful and sustainable it is.
“And it’s about building bridges between people.” †
