In Memoriam: Alexej B. “Sasha” Borkovec

 

by Bobby J. Ward

 

The NARGS family is sad to learn of the death of longtime member Alexej “Sasha” Borkovec, age 84, on June 10, 2010, at his home in Silver Spring, Maryland. He was born in Prague, now Czech Republic, where he earned an undergraduate degree in chemical engineering. After the Communist takeover, Sasha escaped to Germany in 1949 where he met in Munich, Vera, his future wife. Moving with Vera to the United States in 1952, he earned masters and doctoral degrees from Virginia Tech. He worked thirty years for the U.S. Department of Agriculture as a research scientist studying insect reproduction.

          Sasha was a member of the Potomac Valley Chapter of NARGS and built his first rock garden in Kensington, Maryland, in 1965, and a later one in Wheaton in 1973. Chapter member Jim McKenney recalls Sasha describing the tons of gravel he moved to build a rock garden on a hillside behind the house, with the main part of the rock garden sited in clear view from Sasha’s library. “It’s hard to imagine heavily laden gravel trucks making their way up the narrow winding driveway,” McKenney says. The unique feature of Sasha’s rock garden was the walls built from stacks of newspapers. He joked at a lecture he gave at a NARGS study weekend that The Washington Post walls lean to the left, while those of The Wall Street Journal lean to the right.

          Over the years, Sasha was a regular contributor to the Potomac Valley Chapter’s newsletters and to its annual plant sales and exchanges, where he brought Styrofoam cups of cyclamen, dianthus, campanula, and draba that he had germinated. For the North American Rock Garden Society publications, he contributed twenty-three articles on a variety of topics: daphne, hymenoxys, lilium, dwarf conifers, and viola as well as book reviews. He also created a popular series of articles titled “Musings from a Rock Garden,” many of which were earlier published on Alpine-L, the international electronic rock garden society on the Internet. For a period of time, Sasha, was co-moderator of Alpine-L, along with its founder Harry Dewey, another member of the PVC.

          In the Maryland climate of warm summer nights, Sasha was an expert at growing difficult rock garden plants, including gentians, Lewisia tweedyi, and other “impossible ones.” Bob Faden says that Sasha joked he had grown some really nice plants labeled Silene hookeri from the NARGS Seed Exchange. “Some were quite nice, but none was the correct species,” Bob recalls.

          Sasha was active in numerous organizations involving Czech arts and sciences and humanitarian service groups. Alice Nicolson, a member of the PVC, recalls that Sasha and Vera were stalwarts of the expatriate Czech community. On a visit she made to the Czech Republic, Alice photographed Gentiana pannonica in the Pannonian region and sent it to Sasha, who told her these were the mountains through which he escaped Czechoslovakia. Vera and two brothers, both in the Czech Republic, survive him.

          Memorial contributions may be made to the North American Rock Garden Society, Attn: Bobby Ward, Executive Secretary, P.O. Box 18604, Raleigh, NC 27619 or National Czech and Slovak Museum; Library, Attn: Gail Noughton, Director, 87 Sixteenth Avenue, SW, Cedar Rapids, IA 52404.