An Overlooked Bequest: Allowing a Garden to Live On
Image by M. Gustafson Gervasi, 2015 Back in July, as irises still bloomed in my garden, I sipped a coffee and glanced at our local free weekly paper The Isthmus . A story on page 6 caught my attention -- America's longest-serving state legislator, Fred Risser , and his wife Nancy Risser, were profiled for creating an urban oasis in downtown Madison. Over the years the couple worked to turn an apartment complex parking lot into a lush and welcoming garden. Towards the end of the article a nugget of estate planning insight jumped off the page -- the bequest of perennials. Nancy is quoted as saying "A garden is a living thing" after she recounted transplanting iris bulbs from her late-grandmother's home in Texas to the garden here in Madison -- the transplant spurred by Nancy's father's death. While the focus of this article was about creating and fostering natural beauty in an urban setting, the estate planner in me saw the often overlooked bequest -...