Thomas Sproston was buried in Memorial Garden at St. Paul's Episcopal Cathedral
The Burlington Free Press, Oct 2 1988, P. 29, top
' == The memorial garden ==
Thomas Sproston was buried last week, buried where he wanted to be, in the Memorial Garden at St. Paul's Episcopal Cathedral.
Sproston, a botanist who taught plant pathology and mycology for 29 years at the University of Vermont, loved that garden. He'd been on the committee since the beginning, in 1969. That was back in the days at the old cathedral, before it burned to the ground in the disastrous fire of Feb. 15, 1971.
The other members were Dr. David Babbott, Mabel W. Mayforth, Dr. Robert Deane and Hazel Start. They'd sit around the table and plan the garden, decide what was going to go where. On a weekend, Sproston would load up his pickup truck and a work crew would mysteriously appear. Next thing you'd know he'd planted roses, azaleas, climbing hydrangea.
After the fire, the cathedral gardeners just moved the garden, and saved the three marble benches given by the Babbotts. In a way the new garden, designed by Michael Lawrence, was even better, bordered by a taxus yew hedge on the south, sheltered from the traffic on Pearl Street. You could see the garden through the glass doors at the back of the church -- an extension of the narthex.
"We must have planted 400 crocuses yesterday. Just stamped them in," he said one fall day. The next spring, the east bank by the cathedral was covered with blooms and we all remembered his saying that. "Just stamped them in."
On a crisp, cool September day, friends and colleagues of Thomas Sproston walked into the cathedral and out again - into the garden. They filled the walkway, then spilled over onto the grass.
His widow, Betty, stood next to Bishop Robert S. Kerr, Dean Bruce Jacobson, and the Rev. Lizette Dyer-Baxter, almost in front of a cross made of red stone that hung on the high wall. She was holding a vase of pink and deep rose-colored cosmos, fragile in their loveliness.
It was very windy and the clouds were racing across the sky. The wind caught the priest's white cassocks, lifting them up like paper. After the bishop said, "Rest eternal grant to him, O Lord," the dean put the ashes in the ground. Betty knelt and placed the flowers beside them. Suddenly the wind came in gusts, touching everyone who was there.
The bishop dismissed the people ("Let us go forth in the name of Christ"). The service was over.'