The Garden Trolls of Western Pennsylvania
The garden center that Tom McMeekin owns is packed with pumpkins and crimson-petaled mums this time of year. Generations of neighbors have depended on its greenhouse, located along a winding road north of Pittsburgh, for petunias, tomato seedlings, bags of compost, and clay pots for their patios. My mother bought two rose-of-Sharon bushes there that outlived her and bloom still in my sister’s backyard. I always made a detour to Quality Gardens whenever I drove from Washington, D.C., to visit my parents.
A few weeks ago, McMeekin—a level-eyed businessman who at various times has been registered as a Republican and as a Democrat, a Presbyterian elder who preaches to a tiny congregation every Sunday, a local boy who earned both economics and engineering degrees from Carnegie Mellon University—had the idea that he wanted to encourage voting in a state that could determine
