PLOTS THICKEN

Lake Forest Place’s gregarious green thumb and garden committee chair, Patrick Cosgrove, now tends to his eight garden plots—up from four last year— at the senior living community.

Any gardener worth their soil likes to get dirty—literally, not verbally. Lake Forest Place (LFP) resident Patrick Cosgrove was 3 and living near Wrigley Field when he first attacked, without permission, a corner in his back yard. “Used a stick, maybe a big stone, to dig,” the amiable, perennially sunny Cosgrove, 73, recalls.

“I heard my mom (the late Patricia) shout, ‘What are you doing?’ Mom then washed me up inside and told me to read a book.” But Cosgrove didn’t become a bookworm. Patrick wanted to emulate Patricia. “She loved to garden,” says Cosgrove, a former Glenview resident who moved to the senior living community in Lake Forest four years ago after working for 46 years in the corporate food service management industry. “And she could turn a sick houseplant into a thriving one.” LFP is in good hands with Cosgrove as its community garden chair. Forty-four other residents tend to at least one of the 125 5-feet-by-5-feet plots, growing tomatoes, peas, beets, arugula, Brussels sprouts, lettuces, and more. LFP holds an annual lottery for

the plots. Cosgrove has eight, or twice as many as the number of spaces he managed earnestly in 2024. Lasting friendships sprout from involvement, too. “That it’s also a social activity for many of us is another one of the garden club’s appeals,” says Cosgrove, who somehow also finds time to serve as LFP’s social, day trip, dining, and cottage and apartment sales chairs. “We have all kinds of discussions, from sharing gardening tips to going over catalog orders to talking about life. Great group of people here, I’m telling you. I’m never bored here. How could I be? How could anyone be?

There are so many (40) special-interest groups. I don’t feel 73 and I don’t look 73, and I’m crediting gardening, as well as Lake Forest Place, for that.” The Park Ridge native and graduate (like his late father, Joe) of Chicago’s St. Patrick High School is also grateful for having a pair of alarm clocks—one near his bed and one that occasionally stirs him near his raised garden beds at LFP. “I’ve got a built-in alarm clock,” Cosgrove says. “It’s called my back. My back knows exactly when to tell me, ‘That’s enough for today, Patrick.’”