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In Memory of Margaret
Portrait of Margaret Rose Hollister

Margaret Rose Hollister

1946 — 2025

“She saw the whole year
in the way a leaf turned.”

A life remembered

Margaret’s Story

Margaret Rose Hollister was a botanist by training and a gardener by vocation. She grew up in Providence, met David at the University of Rhode Island in 1967, and in 1974 they bought forty acres of tired farmland in western Massachusetts and spent the next fifty-one years teaching it how to grow things again. She restored the orchard.

She built the greenhouse with her own hands, and the second greenhouse when the first proved not enough. She kept a hive of bees. She catalogued four hundred and sixty-three species on their land, in a notebook she updated every March.

She raised two daughters and taught them the Latin name of every wildflower they picked. She grieved for her husband exactly the way she grieved for a tree that died — with attention, and with time, and with the quiet expectation that something would come up in its place. Her memorial service was held under the black walnut she had planted the year she moved in.

It is nearly seventy feet tall now.

1946 — 2025

Margaret’s Journey

  1. 1946
    A row house on Federal Hill. Three sisters, a mother from Palermo, a father from Cork. Basil in every window box.
  2. 1967
    David, on the bench outside the greenhouse at Brown. She was studying botany. He was studying her.
  3. 1974
    Forty acres outside Charlottesville. An old orchard, a fallen-in barn, and every seed she had been saving since college.
  4. 1988
    The greenhouse she designed herself. Twenty by sixty, glass on all four sides, and a wood stove she never lit.
  5. 2025
    Under the walnut tree, in the chair David built her, on the last warm afternoon before frost.
Chapters

Margaret’s Life Chapters

The seasons that shaped a life — told as small pieces of a larger story.

Margaret — Providence girl
Chapter 1

Providence girl

Margaret was born on the second floor of a triple-decker on Federal Hill in Providence, in April 1946, six months after her father Sean returned from the Pacific. Her mother Antonia was the daughter of Sicilian immigrants who had run a small grocery on Atwells Avenue since 1919. Her father, from a family of five brothers out of County Cork, had arrived at Ellis Island in 1928 and worked the docks.

The apartment had three rooms and eventually five people. Margaret was the oldest. Her sisters Rosemarie and Catherine came in 1948 and 1951. The window boxes always held basil, oregano, mint, and — depending on the year — one or two tomato plants that Antonia kept alive by rotating them for sunlight.

Margaret was reading by four. She was pulling weeds in the small backyard by five. By the time she was eight she had planted her first true garden — a raised bed her father built for her out of a broken pallet, packed with soil he had hauled home in a coffee sack. She grew radishes, lettuce, and one very stubborn cucumber. She has not stopped growing something ever since.

1946
Margaret — David
Chapter 2

David

She was in her second year of a botany master's at Brown when she met David Hollister on the wrought-iron bench outside the university's small teaching greenhouse. He was in law school. He was allergic to almost everything green. He had come to the greenhouse, on purpose, to sit near the door and read.

She sat next to him because it was the only bench in the sun. She said, "You do know that most of what you're breathing right now is pollen." He said, "I'm building tolerance." She laughed. They were engaged nine months later.

They married in the summer of 1968, on the back lawn of David's aunt's house in Newport, with sixty guests and a bluegrass band Margaret's father knew from the docks. She wore a white cotton dress and pinned wildflowers into her hair. David wore a linen suit that was already a little wrinkled by the time they walked down the aisle. He never fully outgrew the allergies, but he learned, over the years, to keep tissues in every pocket.

1967
Margaret — The forty acres
Chapter 3

The forty acres

In the spring of 1974, David took a partnership with a firm in Charlottesville and Margaret found a forty-acre property twelve miles west of town, in a listing at the county extension office. There was an old orchard — apples, mostly, half of them dead. There was a fallen-in tobacco barn. There was a two-story farmhouse with rotting sills and honeysuckle growing through the porch railing. She wrote the offer in her head on the drive back to town.

They closed in June. The first summer they camped in the farmhouse while contractors rebuilt the foundation. Margaret spent every daylight hour outside — clearing brush, marking beds, cataloging what was already growing. She kept a spiral notebook in her back pocket for six months and filled it with rough hand-drawn maps of the property.

By the fall she had a working half-acre of vegetables, three restored fruit trees, and the beginnings of a perennial border along the drive. By the second summer they had chickens. By the fourth summer she had planted her first commercial cut-flower field — dahlias, zinnias, cosmos — and was selling to two small florists in town. She kept adding, quietly, one bed at a time, for the next fifty-one years.

1974
Margaret — The greenhouse
Chapter 4

The greenhouse

She designed the greenhouse in the winter of 1987, sitting at the kitchen table with graph paper and a fresh set of colored pencils David had bought her for Christmas. Twenty feet by sixty. Glass on all four sides. A double-pitched roof for maximum light. A slate-tile floor for thermal mass. And a small pot-bellied wood stove in the corner she was very clear she would never actually light.

It took three men and most of the summer of 1988 to build it. David paid for the whole thing and pretended not to notice that Margaret had personally moved every one of the 380 slate tiles from the truck to the floor by hand. When it was done she gave him a bottle of good bourbon and said, "I'll be in there. Come find me at dark."

She started seedlings in it every February for thirty-seven years — tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, basil, and always, always, at least one experimental variety she had ordered from Seed Savers Exchange. She sold plants to the whole county by mid-April. Children came for field trips. She had a folding stool in the corner and a battered radio on a shelf, tuned always to the local classical station. It was, by any measure that mattered to her, the best room she ever lived in.

1988
Margaret — Under the walnut
Chapter 5

Under the walnut

David died in 2019, six years before her. She kept the farm. She had help — a young couple who had rented the tenant house since 2010 and eventually became something closer to family — but she kept working, every day, until the last week of her life.

On a warm October afternoon in 2025 she asked to be brought outside. It was one of those Virginia days when the trees have started to turn but the light is still full summer. Michael, the tenant, carried the wooden chair David had built for her — the one that had lived under the black walnut in the front yard since 1976 — out onto the grass and helped her into it. He brought her a cup of tea and a wool blanket. He asked if she wanted anything else.

She said, "Sit with me for a little while." He did. She looked out at the perennial border, and at the greenhouse, and at the ridgeline in the distance. She was quiet for a long time. Then she said, "I think I got it right." She closed her eyes an hour later. She did not open them again.

2025
Music

Songs Margaret Loved

The music that filled the rooms — and the reasons why.

  1. Cello Suite No. 1
    J.S. Bach
    She played it in the greenhouse every morning.
  2. Big Yellow Taxi
    Joni Mitchell
    She sang along whenever it came on.
  3. Ashokan Farewell
    Jay Ungar
    They danced to it once, in the field, in the rain.
  4. Long Time Sun
    Traditional
    The blessing she said over meals.
  5. Sunflower
    Post Malone
    Her granddaughters picked this. She learned every word.
Legacy

Where She Came From

A Sicilian grocery family and a Cork farming line met on Federal Hill.

Two Families, One Hill

Margaret's grandmother Rosa left a hillside village near Palermo in 1919 with her new husband Salvatore, who opened the small grocery on Atwells Avenue the same year with money borrowed from his brother. They stocked it first from a cart, then a storefront, then shelves Salvatore built himself.

On her father's side, five Whelan brothers farmed poor ground outside Cork before the youngest, Sean's father Michael, sailed for Boston in 1921. He worked rail construction for six years before settling his own family, eventually, near the Providence docks.

Salvatore's grocery on Atwells Avenue in Providence, photographed not long after it opened, 1920.

Salvatore's grocery on Atwells Avenue in Providence, photographed not long after it opened, 1920.

Family lines

The Genovesis of Federal Hill

1919-1961

Salvatore and Rosa Genovesi built the Atwells Avenue grocery from a pushcart into a storefront over their first three years in Providence. They stocked oil, dried beans, and produce from a cousin's farm outside the city, and Rosa kept the books in a mix of Italian and English until she died in 1961.

The Whelans of County Cork

1889-1944

Five Whelan brothers farmed a small rented plot outside Cork through lean decades, and only the youngest, Michael, left for America. He sent money home every month for years until the last of his brothers' families had also emigrated, the final one arriving in 1944 during wartime convoy delays.

Places

Atwells Avenue grocery

1919-1961

The grocery sold oil, cheese, and produce out of barrels and open crates, with a curtained back room where Rosa kept the accounts. Neighbors ran credit through hard winters, and Salvatore rarely pressed anyone who was behind, a habit that kept the store more admired than profitable.

The rented plot near Cork

1889-1921

The Whelan land was six acres of poor soil the family never owned outright, worked by five brothers who slept in one loft room above the byre. Michael left for Boston at twenty with a single trunk and a letter of introduction from the parish priest.

Objects kept

Rosa's grocery scale

Rosa's grocery scale

Rosa weighed dried beans and flour on this brass scale for over three decades. It came with the store when Salvatore bought the fixtures secondhand, and it stayed behind the counter until the grocery finally closed, long after both had died.

Michael's parish letter

Michael's parish letter

The parish priest's letter of introduction traveled in Michael's trunk from Cork to Boston and then to Providence, kept folded in the family Bible for decades. Sean inherited it and could recite, from memory, the line about his father being of good character.

Stories told

The pushcart years

Before the storefront, Salvatore sold produce off a pushcart he wheeled between Federal Hill and the west side, six days a week, in every weather, rain or summer heat alike. Rosa met him on his route while buying onions and, according to family telling, argued him down on price before agreeing to marry him the following spring at Saint Anthony's.

Five brothers, one trunk

When the last Whelan brother's family emigrated in 1944, they carried the same trunk Michael had used twenty-three years earlier, patched twice and re-hinged once by a Cork cobbler. It held little of value, mostly letters and a christening gown, but no one in the family would ever consider leaving it behind, wherever they went next.

Letters

Remembrances

A few of the voices closest to Margaret’s life.

She taught us that patience is not the absence of urgency. It is the presence of trust that something is growing that we can't see yet.

Sarah daughter

Every plant in my apartment is a cutting from something at Grandmama's. I don't know if she planned it that way, but that's how it turned out.

Willow granddaughter

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