Remembering Dave Hull

Dave Hull poses with V after delivering items harvested from the Project Host garden.

If you’ve ever visited Project Host, it will quickly become clear to you that this organization runs on volunteers. Each week, dozens of people give freely of their time to help make the work we do in the community possible, and we are grateful to each of them.

Sometimes, though, a particularly special volunteer comes along, who really takes a program and makes it their own, and an organization is forever changed as a result of their efforts. Such was the case when David Perry Hull, who passed away in June of this year, set foot in the Project Host garden.

It was happenstance that Dave ended up at Project Host, as so often these things are. He and his wife, Karen, had moved from Wilmington, NC, to Greenville, SC, in 2015, and Dave was growing frustrated that his North Carolina Master Gardner certification was not transferrable to South Carolina.

“Dave would drive to Flat Rock, NC, and do his gardening up there because of this,” Karen explained. “I was in a newcomers group and volunteered at the Soup Kitchen at Project Host, and there was an announcement that, while you all needed help in the Soup Kitchen, the garden also needed some volunteer help.”

Karen set up a meeting between Dave and then-Executive Director Sally Green. “Dave walked in and said, ‘I’d like to see your garden,’ remembers Sally, “and then he said, ‘Okay, I’ll give you a year.’” That was in 2016, and, in the end, one year turned into nearly four, before COVID came along and put some of Project Host’s programs on ice.

“It was fun working with Dave,” recalls Sally. “We both liked nontraditional flowers and looked into different perennials and annuals for the garden. Dave was great at seed starting and fine tuned the system, so it really worked well.”

Indeed, for Dave, the garden almost became like his job. He was known to be there five or six days a week to make sure seedlings were watered and everything was in good order. This was very much in keeping with Dave’s overall personality and work ethic, according to Karen.

Dave grew up in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and got an early start to gardening when he worked on his paternal grandfather’s dairy farm. At age 10 he was driving a tractor around the farm and helping run things. He was a hardworking student and attended Carnegie Mellon University, where he majored in printing.

Dave went on to pursue a career in can manufacturing, and even though he took early retirement because his company was bought out, he continued to work on and off for several more years before he and Karen landed in Wilmington for their official retirement and Dave took on gardening as a hobby, alongside golfing.

Karen explains that finding the garden at Project Host after they relocated to Greenville was a good thing for Dave, and for their sanity as a couple: “He traveled all our married life, and in retirement he was home every day. This got him out of the house from about 8 to noon, and then he’d come work in our garden at home. His work in the Project Host garden made life work for us post-retirement.”

Much as Dave designed and engineered things throughout his career, he did the same in the Project Host garden, always looking for ways to streamline and improve operations for better results. Sally recalls that “Dave took over and did it all. We had done a plant sale before Dave, but the plant sales were never as complete or had the kind of variety that we had with Dave. He raised the level of that sale and generally the awareness of the garden.”

Even when Dave was traveling, he was always on the lookout for new tools and techniques to bring to the garden. When visiting his son in Florida, Dave stopped by nurseries and farms to learn the Florida weave, a special way to trellis tomatoes. He was also interviewed in a local Greenville paper on how to grow tomatoes, and people will still ask for Dave’s magical instructions and fertilizer blend when they come to the Project Host plant sale each year.

Longtime garden volunteer Jim Carroll attested to Dave’s experimental and teaching spirit out in the garden. “He always had an idea about what to do, and I learned a lot from him. He taught us all how to germinate seeds and rotate plants.”

But it is Dave’s spirit and kindness, more than anything else, that will be missed at Project Host and by all of his family and friends throughout the country.

“Dave was a warm, happy man that was proud of his children and his grandchildren and would do anything in the world for somebody,” remarks Sally. “People were important to him, relationships were important to him. He had relationships from every part of his life that he kept going.”

Project Host was honored to host a celebration of life in memory of Dave after his funeral service, and staff got to pay witness to just how loved Dave was. At least 100 people from around the country and all walks of life were present to pay tribute to Dave, and to witness the mark that he has left on our organization.

Project Host Executive Director Tobin Simpson reflected on Dave’s impact, stating:

“Dave worked hard to take the yield of the garden to new heights. He also gladly shared his knowledge of how to get the best results from plants purchased at the plant sale, but the things we will miss the most are intangible. Dave was wonderful at taking the time to make people feel welcomed. The time he took to make a stranger feel like a new friend was the real reason people came back year after year to get their plants. Dave really did take the human element to heart and that is the legacy he leaves behind at Project Host.”

By Claudia Winkler