Powell has worked for more than 40 years as a vocational counselor and employment specialist for the state Department of Education. She loves helping people with work-related disabilities find a job or training.

But in the evenings and weekends, Powell comes alive in her garden.

She not only tends her flowers; she takes pictures, too. “I like causes. Once I wanted to save the world, but then I realized that all you can save and preserve is your own lot,” she said.

Her lot is a double in Kearney, where she raises native and non-native plants without chemicals. She calls it “wild and wonderful.”

“I realize I can’t get rid of all the plastic in the ocean, but I can do gardening and grow things,” she said.

She has daylilies, rose lilies, sunflowers, milkweed pods, peonies, tulips, poppies and more. Every day, she walks out with her phone and takes digital pictures — 20 or 30 or 40 of them. She keeps them all on her phone, arranged by date.

“Peonies start coming in May, and then other things start blooming,” she said.

Some are native. Some are non-native. She even has a Portillo ground cover that she said, grinning happily, “looks exotic” when she gets within a nose length to take its picture. She’ll have goldenrod and cone flowers into the fall.

She also has fruit trees, including five apricot trees, so she makes plenty of apricot jam. “They don’t always produce, and with spring earlier this year, I didn’t know what would happen, but as fate would have it, they produced like mad,” she said.

“I don’t like to waste a darn thing, and I can’t reach all the branches, but I pick what I can,” she said. “I also make apricot ginger sauce and run around town giving it away.”

It was those apricot trees that started her gardening frenzy. She wanted to plant hazelnut trees, so eight years ago or so, she ordered some from Nebraska City’s Arbor Day event.

“I got what looked like little sticks. I planted them, and then they wanted me to report back. The first year, they didn’t grow a thing, but in year two, they grew and produced not hazelnuts, but what turned out to be apricots,” she said.

Powell also has a cherry tree and two mulberry trees. She grows raspberries, too.

Along the way, she got interested in bees, so she began doing research and took classes in beekeeping at the Grand Island campus of Central Community College.

Now she has three beehives. She takes pictures of her bees, too.

“My yard isn’t a groomed yard. I have big areas of wildness. My goal was to get rid of most of the turf,” she said. “There are some grassy areas, but most of it is planted with plants and trees. Nothing grows under my apricot trees.”

Powell has never been married (“I came close a couple of times”), but she has countless friends, and she happily gives them her sauces and jellies. She has belonged to Noon Rotary for 30 years and enjoys Senior College.

She has continued to take classes ever since earning a degree in psychology from what was then Kearney State College (now the University of Nebraska at Kearney) four decades ago. She holds a master’s degree in agency counseling from UNK but has taken classes in business, human resources and more.

She also has been part of a quilting group and has taken classes in felting and watercolor. “I love to learn. I love art and creativity,” she said.

She shared her art in an exhibition of photographs of the flowers and bees in her garden in Augustin Wood River. “The Garden Through My Eyes” was a hit at the Wildflower Gallery at 108 W. Ninth St.

She was invited to show her photography in Wood River by Carol Hines, a friend, caterer and artist who owns the Wildflower Gallery and renovated it into a cozy art studio.

“I haven’t been trained in photography, but I’ve been told anyone is an artist if they create work, and I’ve created work every day for the past 10 or 12 years,” Powell said.

She loves to cook, too. Along with that apricot ginger sauce, she makes a cherry shrub, an old recipe. She soaks the cherries in vinegar and winds up with a refreshing probiotic drink.

“This whole connection with nature and the yard and living things branches out to other beautiful opportunities for me,” she said. “I love sharing them with other people.”