There are people who are avid gardeners, and then there are people like Normand Boucher.

Mr. Boucher, who died Saturday in Kennebunkport at 83, was a gardener’s gardener. He used to love visiting a daughter, Paulette Boucher, at her home in Florida during the winter, at least in part because it meant he could garden year-round, said Helen McCann, one of his four daughters.

A couple of years ago, he planted two gardens at his daughter’s house in Florida and lost them both to unusual frosts, McCann said. Undeterred, he planted again, and he finally beat the frosts.

At one point in Maine, he was tending about 2,000 tomato plants, along with peppers and other vegetables, said Jim McCann, Helen McCann’s husband. He sold the tomatoes to local restaurants and markets and gave some away to friends and neighbors, he said.

“As he got older, he kept telling me that his gardens would get smaller, but they didn’t really,” McCann said. “They might go from 2,000 (tomato plants) to 1,900.”

Mr. Boucher had other interests besides digging in the soil. He was one of the founders of the Biddeford Youth Football Association in the early 1970s and had a number of jobs over the years, from meat cutter to 26 years in the Biddeford public works department to restaurant owner.

Mr. Boucher and his father, Ephrem, opened the White Caps Restaurant in Biddeford Pool in the late 1940s. The summer-only restaurant was primarily a take-out place, McCann said. But after his father died, Mr. Boucher was working two other jobs while trying to run the restaurant along with the gardening, and it got to be too much. In the late 1960s, he sold the restaurant, McCann said.

After that, it became one job and the garden, McCann said — along with his long-running battles with the woodchucks.

Mr. Boucher used to go out hunting for woodchucks and, with the hat he favored, the family used to make plenty of Elmer Fudd jokes. Mr. Boucher laughed along, McCann said, but he was deadly serious about keeping the woodchucks away from his plants. At one point, he found a woodchuck hole, poured gasoline down a hose into it, then tossed in a match.

“That works, but needless to say, don’t try this at home,” McCann said.

As Mr. Boucher got older, his children worried a little about him working so hard in the garden. It wasn’t unusual to see him in his 80s, stooped over in the summer heat, pulling weeds, Helen McCann said.

“We’d tell him, ‘We don’t want to find you out there, planted head down,’ ” she said. “He said, ‘If I have to have a way to go, that’s the way I’d want it.’ “

Staff Writer Edward D. Murphy can be contacted at 791-6465 or at:

emurphy@pressherald.com

 

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