By Carolyn Barnes

Photo by Monique Schoenfeld, Town Crier

Town Crier Correspondent

Mary McLanathan’s bouquets celebrate weeks and seasons at local churches

Mary McLanathan’s love for flowers blossomed during her childhood on an apricot and prune ranch in Los Gatos.

“My mother loved flowers, especially cabbage roses,” McLanathan said. “The Japanese nurseryman who helped with her big flower garden always said, if you have $1 to spend on your garden, spend 75 cents of it on fertilizer.”

Today, the down-to-earth McLanathan is “retired” but leads a life powered by flowers.

She rises at 3 or 3:30 a.m. every Friday, drives herself to the San Francisco Flower Market on Brannon Street, and purchases enough seasonal blooms and foliage to fill 15 buckets. Then she drives back to Los Altos, conditions the stems in her special preservative solution (recipe at the end of this article), and over the next day and a half creates three huge flower arrangements - one for St. William Catholic Church in Los Altos and two more for chapels located on the grounds of the Seton Provincialate in Los Altos Hills.

“Her arrangements help identify who we are,” said associate pastor Kathy Schlosser of St. William. “A picture of one of them is on the cover of our membership directory, and one of her arrangements is featured on our Web site at www.churchregistry.com\swla.”

Rev. Michael Burns, pastor of St. William Catholic Church, calls it a labor of love. “She’s fantastic,” he said. “She uses absolutely every kind of flower, branches of fruit trees, sometimes nothing but beautiful greens - but she doesn’t want anyone to watch her arranging and she’s never completely pleased.”

“I sit there during morning Mass, critique what I did, and I see how I could make an arrangement better, and I can hardly wait to go up and change it,” McLanathan said.

Her high standards made her the respected dean of biological and health sciences at Foothill College for 18 years, where she taught biology, bacteriology, zoology, anatomy and botany.

“I still hear from my old students or see them around the Peninsula,” she said. “I taught the bio core program for those who transferred to Cal or Stanford, and many are now doctors or dentists.”

She earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees at Stanford University and also studied there toward a doctorate; but withdrew to marry fellow student Rod McLanathan. In 1945 they bought the house in Los Altos where Mary still lives. Over the years she has enriched the soil in the garden, using compost and fertilizer, to create a showplace of perennials, fruit trees and many unusual specimen plants.

“You know how terrible most of the soil is around Los Altos?” asked Burns. “Well, I always say that if you stuck a broomstick into Mary’s garden, it would bloom, because the soil is so fertile. And she fertilizes the roses around the outside of our church, as well as creating her spectacular arrangements inside.”

McLanathan is modest to a fault - “Please keep any story about me low-key; I just do whatever I can,” she said - and she doesn’t keep exact track of her own volunteer work. As far as anyone knows, she has been arranging flowers at St. William’s for more than 15 years, because that job preceded her volunteer flower arranging at the Seton Provincialate, off Altamont Road in Los Altos Hills.

“One day I was watering my arrangement inside the St. William’s sanctuary and I heard a knock on the door. It was two nuns from Seton saying they liked my arrangement on the altar that week and asking if I would do a special arrangement for their celebration of their patron saint, St. Vincent de Paul, on Sept. 27 that year. I did that one and then have been arranging for them ever since.”

“Mary has been making beautiful, graceful arrangements at our Provincialate Chapel and the Laboure Chapel for about 15 years,” said Sister Cecilia Van Zandt, Seton’s director of hospitality. “Her flowers create the kind of atmosphere that enriches our worship. They make our people eager to see what she has done each week.”

“The array of flowers available today is so much greater than it used to be,” McLanathan said. “They fly flowers in from all over the world now, whereas so many used to come from Half Moon Bay or from local farms.”

She pays for all of her own flowers and supplies.

“If the church had to pay for arrangements like hers, it would cost us a fortune,” said Olivia Haley, St. William’s office manager. “One of our parishioners, Arlene Kramer, took pictures of the arrangements over a year’s time and then made a church calendar with them.”

The pedestal behind the church altar that holds each week’s arrangement was purchased by Burns about six years ago; until then, the floral bouquet was placed beside a lectern.

“When he got the pedestal, he said, ‘Mary, see what you can do here,’” McLanathan said. That was when her bouquets really got huge and when she developed a grand, fan-shaped silhouette.

“Thank God for Oasis (floral foam, which is soaked in water and then used in containers to hold flower and foliage stems),” McLanathan said. “In the old days, all we had was chicken wire.”

She uses about seven blocks of fresh foam per arrangement each week, going through a case of the porous green stuff every two or three weeks.

“You wouldn’t believe how much water flowers soak up the first couple of days after they are arranged,” McLanathan said. “For two to three days, starting on Saturday, I refill the container with water (around the Oasis blocks) three times per day.”

“She practically lives here!” said Silvia Villasenor, a St. William’s liturgist and pianist. “But we don’t want her to get stolen away from us when people read about her - she’s ours.”

McLanathan insists on calling herself an amateur arranger and can’t explain exactly how she makes her creations.

“If you were to ask me how I will do this coming week’s flowers, I couldn’t really tell you. This week I’m thinking of a Hawaiian tropical effect, but until I get started I can’t say what I’ll do. I’m the kind who puts in a stem and then pulls out a stem,” McLanathan said.

For her granddaughter Mya’s wedding in Half Moon Bay two years ago, she used only white flowers - dendrobium orchids, roses, trailing ivies, lilies, freesia and pale green hydrangeas. She created the bouquets, table décor and all of the flower arrangements, another labor of love with flowers.

Then there’s McLanathan’s nonfloral volunteer work: every day of the year, she opens up St. William for early Mass, turning on the lights and heat and checking on the flowers. She assumes the roles of lector and commentator during the worship service.

“To do this every day is really a dedication,” Haley said.

McLanathan has also volunteered for years with the Mountain View-Los Altos Community Foundation Alpha Omega program, which provides shelter, food and a structured environment for the homeless who are working or seeking work. In recent years, when Alpha Omega clients are staying at St. Nicholas Catholic Church in Los Altos, she works every evening for a week, usually with her friend Mims Munro.

“I just have a lot of energy,” McLanathan said to explain her life of service, but Burns sees it differently.

“She is a loving, dedicated woman you can’t help but like and admire,” he said.