New Community Garden honors beloved Obici nurse

Sydni Connally loved gardens. She loved spending time in the gardens she kept through the years at her home, and she had been a big part of the Suffolk Partnership for a Healthy Community’s community gardens project.

As a registered nurse working in Sentara Obici Hospital’s cardiac rehabilitation department, the 41-year-old had a unique perspective on the importance of a healthy lifestyle, especially as it related to healthy eating. That perspective aligned well with the Partnership’s goal of improving the health of people in Suffolk by getting them to eat better and become more active.

So the fact that Obici Hospital is hosting the sixth community garden planted as part of the Partnership’s two-year program would have been a big deal for her.

Tragically, though, she died of a massive pulmonary embolism on Jan. 13, a day after losing a newborn child.

She would never see the plant boxes built by volunteers in a small field behind the Growing Up at Obici daycare center, where her 3-year-old son Jack attends school.

“If she was still here, I’m sure she would be out here today,” her husband Steve said during a break from helping to prepare the planting beds on Saturday.

He had volunteered to help in order to show his appreciation to the many Obici staff members and friends who have supported him since his wife’s death nearly a month ago. There were 600 people at her funeral, he said, many of them from the hospital, where she had spent nearly her entire nursing career.

Sydni had graduated from the Obici nursing program when the hospital had been located in its original building on North Main Street, and the Portsmouth native had made many friends locally in the ensuing years.

“The people that work at this hospital have been absolutely phenomenal,” Steve said.

The new garden — originally intended as just a continuation of the Partnership’s community garden program — has turned into much more as Obici’s staffers have sought to memorialize their friend.

Buried in the ground beneath one of the new raised beds is a small bag with bits of fabric from Sydni’s nurse’s uniform, along with other mementoes of her life, Steve said. A special section of the garden will include benches and trees placed in her honor, along with stepping stones and other items intended to give visitors a place to sit down and reflect.

The area will be known as Sydni’s Sanctuary, according to Debbie Ferguson, a human resources manager at Obici and one of the organizers of Saturday’s work party.

But the garden will be functional, as well, with beds that are expected to produce everything from spinach and broccoli during the cold months to summer vegetables and fruits in the spring and summer. There will even be scuppernong grapes growing on an arbor and blueberry bushes at the back of the garden once everything is complete.

The growing vegetables and fruits will give the daycare center’s 90 or so students, all children of Obici employees, an opportunity to learn about gardening and healthy eating.

They also will be used to educate the hospital’s cancer patients, according to Pat Thornton, Obici’s breast cancer navigator.

“We encourage cancer patients during treatment and after treatment to maintain nutrition so they can maintain their strength,” Thornton said.

The new garden will give the staff nutritionists the opportunity to offer more than just encouragement, though. At the height of the garden’s productivity, Thornton expects her patients will be sent home with ready-to-eat salad bowls full of fresh vegetables grown right on site.

“This will be a good foundation for them to start on a healthy life,” she said.

“This is truly a vibrant team,” said Kay Cherry, who teaches in the graduate program in public health at the Eastern Virginia Medical School and helped found the community gardens program in Suffolk in 2009.

“This is going to be absolutely a stellar garden.”

Cherry and Suffolk Partnership Executive Director Jaya Tawari were among the volunteers helping to set up the garden on Saturday. They said this is just one of the new gardens planned as a part of the program this year.

A new garden will be planted at Nansemond-Suffolk Academy in the spring, and another will be planted in Whaleyville.

“It’s a great concept,” Tawari said. “(It provides) a safe, fun, interesting way for the community to learn the benefits of healthy eating.”

And, as a group of volunteers proved in a small field behind Obici Hospital on Saturday, it also can be a great way to honor a lost friend.