Dean MacHines owned and operated a successful gardening and landscaping business. He loved his work. He inherited his passion for horticulture from his father, Donald MacHines. Even though the elder MacHines worked long hours at the local automotive factory, his weekends were spent tending to a modest yet inspired home garden with his eldest son. Dean cherished those rare moments spent holding a watering can following his father’s every move. On the day Dean quit a lucrative job at a corporate law firm, an apparition of his father visited him - reportedly, with a hoe in hand.
When Donald died of brain cancer – developed from extended exposure to asbestos at the factory, Dean was overwhelmed with grief. His mother, Doreen MacHines, would recall, in a May 2006 profile of her son in Horticulture Illustrated Quarterly, that her the fifteen year old son slept with the tomatoes for three days and three nights before he was able to express his grief. “Those poor tomatoes,” he reportedly vailed. “They lost their father.” In spite of the grave circumstances surrounding his father's passing, he shed not a tear; a fact Doreen proudly noted. To punctuate his time with the tomatoes, they were harvested and brought to his father’s gravesite. And, as was reported, he lovingly projected each and every one of them at the tombstone out of a sense of respect and reverence. “He wouldn’t have had it any other way,” he told journalist James J. Kutsch. James would write in his May 2006 article that even though the son’s tribute was unorthodox, unconventional, and would probably be considered blasphemous as well as immoral by most of his readers, it was a tribute offered with simple sincerity and heart, the best kind of salute. The tomato stains remain visible at Donald MacHines’ resting place today, nearly two decades later, a constant reminder about the unique relationship between son, father, and the spirit of the soil. It was a relationship that inspired Dean to pursue a passion he was born for.
