Remembering Roberta Heinz

On February 1, 2025, the world, JCMGA, and many of us as individuals lost a valuable friend and co-worker when Roberta Heinz said her final goodbyes. Roberta is survived by her husband John, their son, Chip and his family. She taught school for many years in California, teaching the basics, but also how to garden, play a guitar, and sing songs.  She loved teaching and children loved her. She also worked with many cities up and down the west coast on their computer programs.

Roberta took the Master Gardener class and the Practicum in 2012 and began making things more efficient right away. All the plant labels were made by hand at the time, which was very time consuming.  Roberta developed a system for computerizing the process. This sometimes involved driving to SOREC more than once a week to deliver labels in time for one of the practicum sessions.  Though refined every year, her system is still in use today.  She was always asking, “What if we ……?”  She’d come up with some amazing ideas and we would try them out.  If they flopped, she’d just move on, but she always tried.

Roberta was also involved in the layout and setting up of the Practicum booths at Spring Garden Fair. Then she’d spend two full days working in the Treasurer’s Room, counting money from admissions and plant sales, making sure everything balanced.

As if that wasn’t enough, Roberta worked in, and finally ran the Children’s Garden for thirteen years. She developed enough curriculum and guest speakers so that no child would ever have to repeat a lesson, even if they attended for every year they were eligible.  When age forced her to retire as the Garden Education Mentor for that program, there was no one who felt they could replace her, so the Children’s Garden was repurposed as the Vegetable Garden. Her work has been archived in the JCMGA Dropbox with the hope that someone in the future will want to resurrect the program. In the meantime, it is being shared with the children’s program at Sanctuary One.

We all loved having Roberta in meetings, where her sage advice and humor were greatly appreciated. She graciously and cheerfully handled huge jobs and made it all look very easy. During the pandemic when we could have no contact with the public, and before she herself contracted Covid, Roberta maintained the plants from our Native Plants Nursery and ran an ongoing non-contact sale from her barn.  JCMGA provided masks and instructional signs for purchasing plants and leaving payment. Lynn Kunstman would deliver plants from the nursery and pick up the cash for deposit and Roberta would turn on the water daily to keep the plants alive.

She would often have the Fundraising Working Group over to work in her barn on Christmas decorations, wreaths, and bulb sorting for the Fall Festival. These sessions often involved laughing at so many things that probably no one else would have found funny.

She was an amazing quilter. She often created beautiful designs, usually with a cat on her lap. She enjoyed bird watching, OLLI classes, reading into the night, working puzzles, and her many friends.  She sent birthday cards, Christmas cards, and note cards to many people.  She was dedicated to JCMGA and was always ready to help in any way she could.

Annette Carter remembers the first garage sale we had. She has a picture of Roberta running with a kite trying to fly it.  She also rode many donated bikes. Back in those days she seemed to trot everywhere she went.  I remember the bond she formed with my great granddaughter and the two of them rolling in the fall leaves in Roberta’s front yard.

Roberta was strong, smart as a whip, and dedicated to helping JCMGA in so many ways. There is so much more that can be said about her. She was our friend, our sister, and we are so blessed that we got to spend time with her.  She will be sorely missed. For the last few years of Roberta’s life, Master Gardener Norma Lamerson helped Roberta and John.  She says it for us all: ” There is so much to write down for Roberta. I can’t get it out without a rush of emotion. I became very close to her and John. I truly feel I will never be the same after losing her. I’m gonna miss her so bad!”