News and Events

Christmas came early for Hatcher Garden. The gift the garden received would have made Harold Hatcher proud.

“Dad loved recycling everything,” Alice Hatcher Henderson says of her father who created Hatcher Garden one parcel at a time on the property adjacent to his west side home in Spartanburg. “He was famous among his friends for never buying new clothing, new cars or new appliances but trying to get one more year out of something that others would have thrown in the trash years earlier.”

That frugality allowed the Hatchers, a retired couple of modest means, to amass the 10-acre woodland garden in the heart of the city that they eventually deeded to the Spartanburg County Foundation, a gift that allowed the formation of the non-profit Hatcher Garden & Woodland Preserve. “In his beginning years of creating Hatcher Garden, his first challenge was to fill the enormous erosion-caused gully through the middle of the property, enabling the future plantings of over 10,000 trees, shrubs and plants,” Hatcher horticulturist Jeff Hall says of the labor intensive process of creating a garden out of unused space.

“He successfully accomplished this with limited financial resources, routinely asking throughout the community for leftover materials such as chunks of concrete sidewalk, bricks, yard debris, and dirt that he recycled to improve the garden landscape.”

Recently Hall decided that it was time to get rid of a backhoe that Hatcher had used to landscape the woodland space that fronts on Reidville Road. The little yellow machine was now retired, sitting rusting and useless. Hall and Doug Nash, chairman of the Hatcher Garden board, decided to try to sell it for scrap.

They hoped the small Terramite tractor loader backhoe might bring enough money to help out with a few garden chores. When they approached Andy Falatok, a longtime supporter of Hatcher Garden, for advice, he suggested that instead of scrapping it, he might be able to sell it though his new company, Yellow Tag Auctions, if he could get it running and spruce it up a bit.

Falatok, who grew up in Woodland Heights close to Hatcher Garden, has been in the textile machinery business for 30 years. He hoped his fledgling on-line auction company might be able to market the tractor for more than scrapping it would bring.

“We picked it up on a roll back, the mechanics gave it a little TLC, and it was bought by a man up in North Carolina,” Falatok says of how he helped provide an early Christmas present for the garden. “It was really nice to be able to do something for a non-profit to help them out.”

True to Harold Hatcher’s philosophy, there was a buyer out there who was ready to get more years of use out of the piece of equipment. Instead of settling for $500 for scrapping the tractor, Hatcher Garden ended up with more than $3,500, money that will be used to make improvements in the garden.

Henderson has fond memories of how her father recycled leaves and twigs for mulch and recycled pots to grow his seedlings. “I know he hoped the tractor would be used until it had disintegrated into a pile of flakes of rust,” she says of her father’s philosophy that everything should be used until it was used up.

Harold Hatcher would be proud to know that his practice of saving and using every possible piece of equipment, or scrap material, or leftover supplies has once again brought financial resources to the garden.