In Memoriam

Pennie Penttila Logemann '39 Like Thoreau, she had a masterful knowledge of plants By Karen Hammond '64

A swamp in the backyard might discourage many gardeners, but in 1952, Pennie Penttila Logemann '39 considered the muddy bog at her new home in Concord, Mass., an exciting challenge. She incorporated it into the overall design of her garden, turning it into a thing of beauty so lush with wildflowers, blueberry bushes and flowering shrubs that the Massachusetts Horticultural Society awarded her a bronze medal for design.

Logemann, who died on Oct. 8 of complications following a stroke, was the daughter of Finnish emigrants and spoke no English when she began school in a two-room schoolhouse. She graduated from high school as salutatorian, studied pre-med at UNH and worked as head of the bacteriology laboratory at Springfield (Mass.) Hospital before her marriage.

Logemann was active in garden clubs and had "an extraordinary knowledge of plants, including all their Latin names" says her friend Mary Walker, a former New England Wild Flower Society librarian who drew on Logemann's expertise for major projects like identifying and organizing thousands of wildflower slides for the group's lending library.

In the late 1960s, Logemann took classes at Radcliffe, earning credentials as a master gardener and landscape design master consultant. She taught adult education classes, including several at Harvard's Arnold Arboretum.

Like Henry David Thoreau, Logemann kept copious notes about the growth cycles of her flowers and plants. She shared her 30 years of observations with biologists at Boston University; an article in the journal Ecology that drew on her data concluded that in Concord, common plants now flower on average seven days earlier than they did in Thoreau's day.

Before moving in the mid-1990s to Bedford, Mass., Logemann made a video of her Concord gardens with the help of her then-10-year-old granddaughter, Sarah Whitney. She wrote a script that called for her granddaughter to ask about rare flowers. Instead, the excited little girl began asking about every plant that caught her eye. "Grandma answered my unscripted questions until I asked her about a small orange flower," says Whitney. Her grandmother's response—"That's nothing but a marigold"—made it very clear that she considered marigolds "the McDonald's of the plant world," Whitney says. "I quickly realized that I was in the company of a flower master, and that if I wasn't more careful, I could be caught asking her about a dandelion or, God forbid, a weed." Whitney stuck to the script.

Logemann's enthusiasm for plants spanned the seasons. In winter she gave small terrariums as holiday gifts. Every spring she threw memorable May wine parties, says her friend Mary McClintock, serving wine she made from sweet woodruff. A favorite fall tradition, says her daughter Lois Whitney, was planting daffodils. After she died, her daughter and son-in-law planted a special bed of daffodils in her memory.

Logemann and her husband, Hugo, climbed all the 4,000-foot peaks in the White Mountains. Her quick wit never left her. At age 91, she and Whitney created a Halloween costume. They attached a large photo of a penny to an 8-inch circle of gold cardboard, which Logemann wore like a pendant. Says Whitney, "She had more fun, flipping that cardboard to reveal words on the back that read, 'I'm a rare penny!'"

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