I have I will. Windmill Crossing Estates was built across the south fence line in 2010 on what had been the Yost Maderry Farm. 38 homes on lots between half an acre and 2 acres around a small central green with a decorative wooden windmill. A Pella reference no resident from outside Iowa would have understood. The development had been quiet through the 2000s.
Berkeley Markham Stratton moved into lot 14, the largest pad 3,000 square ft on the south-facing slope in March of 2018 with her husband Wesley Stratton, a recently retired Pell Corporation marketing executive. They had paid $840,000 cash. Wesley was 51 at the time, retired with a generous pension. Berkeley was 39. She had been a magazine writer for a regional gardening publication out of Cedar Rapids.
She quit the magazine the year they moved to Pella. She decided to become, by her own description in her HOA welcome biography, a competitive heritage flower grower with a focus on rare Dutch tulip varieties. I want to describe Berkeley as Pella came to know her because Pella is a particular kind of small town and Berkeley was a particular kind of newcomer. Pella is a Dutch heritage town of just under 11,000 people. The Dutch families who founded it in 1847, the Dac family, the Schulta family, the Boyers, still have descendants who hold an annual reunion at the Pella Historical Village.
The town runs on a slow Dutch courtesy that an outsider can mistake for warmth. Berkeley mistook it for warmth. She arrived in 2018 with the marketing magazine confidence of a woman who had decided before she ever moved that she was going to be a Pella celebrity. She wore yellow rain boots to the tulip time parade. She brought a tape measure to a Pella Garden Club potluck and measured another woman's hydrangea.
She referred to the Pella Historical Village curator Anka Vermuan as the museum lady. She drove a black BMW X5 with a vanity plate that read T U L I P QN. She wrote a 2019 letter to the Des Moines Register editorial page suggesting that the Pella Tulip Time Festival should adopt professional-grade competition standards because the existing standards favored sentimental local growers over serious horticultural talent. The letter was signed Berkeley Markham Stratton. Anka Vermuan had cut the letter out and framed it in her office.
The frame still hangs there. Anka has shown it to many people. She told me the day she gave me the founding member pin. Edmund, we knew in 2019 that she would not last. We were waiting on her to do it to herself.
We did not know she would do it through your well. Berkeley got herself elected HOA board president in October of 2020 by a vote of 22 to 15. She had run on a platform of Pella aesthetic excellence and community garden representation at tulip time. She had won because the previous president had moved to Florida and the alternative candidate was Theren Vermuan's older sister Saskia who had declined the seat. Berkeley won her first Pella Tulip Time Grand Champion ribbon in 2021.
The category was single variety display heritage. She had grown a 30x30 bed of a rare Dutch breeder tulip called Seer Augustus, a tulip that had not been seen in cultivation by some accounts since the 1630s. The Pella Garden Club had been astonished. The local Des Moines register had run a feature. Berkeley had won grand champion again in 2022, this time for a mixed parrot tulip border.