Friday, February 14, 2025
Elaine Donaldson, of Sonora, loves flowers. “A lady I used to work with at the bank says that when I go out to talk to my flowers, I fondle them,” said Elaine with a hearty laugh.
Elaine has always been active in Sonora. In the late 1950s, as a high school student, she was a guide at the newly opened Sonora Caverns. She ran the Devil’s River Inn for a couple of years and took guests to the caverns. She is manager of the museum and serves as secretary-treasurer of the Mason County Historical Society. But she loves tending to plants.
When she was a child, she spent some time in a neighbor’s greenhouse. “In the summertime when school was out, I would go to the greenhouse and play with the plants and water them. That’s when I started propagating plants. I think it was ivy that I propagated first. I took several long runners off an ivy plant and put them in a jug of water. It didn’t take long for them to root. I thought, hey, this is fun. I’m going to keep doing this. So, many years later I’m still doing it. I just like growing things. There is an arrowhead plant that grows kind of like ivy, and I‘ve got so many cuttings that I’m going to have to give some of them to somebody. I give a lot of my stuff away. Then some of it my daughter in Del Rio takes, and later brings it back to me to revive.”
She has very few plants in the ground. Most are in pots. She’ll put her potted plants in her greenhouse in mid-November. She grows bougainvillea. “And the guy at the greenhouse in San Angelo told me I couldn’t do it because it was so hard. But I take a piece of chicken wire, attach it to a shallow dishpan then stick those bougainvillea cuttings through the holes in the chicken wire and that’s how I grew them. I had pretty good luck doing it that way.”
A nurseryman told her how to grow big Boston ferns. “He says you water them every single day and fertilize them once a week. And that’s what I do. They get huge.”
Elaine inherited her love of flowers and plants from her father who collected bluebonnet seeds.
“You know when you plant bluebonnet seeds they might not come up for two or three years depending on the condition. So, he would keep those seeds, put them in a bucket and he would drive along the highways in Sutton and Schleicher counties throwing the seeds out. So, our highways in both counties were solid bluebonnets for several years. He worked for the highway department, so he and the men working with him spread the seeds.”
Her dad was recognized for what he did.
“He was given the very first Lady Bird Johnson Keep Texas Beautiful Award. It was a pretty big deal. President Johnson was there along with Lady Bird. It was at the LBJ State Park, and a lot of people were there.”
