on the beach in Chilmark, MA
Trudy Taylor, the widely-admired matriarch of the musical Taylor family, died Saturday at her home overlooking Stonewall Beach in Chilmark, surrounded by family and friends. She was one month shy of her 93rd birthday. The cause was complications of old age, her daughter Kate Taylor said.
At once petite and sturdy, elegant and outspoken, Trudy had endless curiosity in people and the world around her, especially the natural world. She was a master gardener who earned state recognition for her sustainable seaside gardens that surrounded her modest home. Living by the sea came naturally to her; she grew up in Newburyport, the daughter of a commercial fisherman.
“My people were all fishermen, real fishermen,” she told the Gazette an interview last year. “We’re Vikings, on my father’s side.”
She had lived on the Vineyard year round since the 1970s, but began coming before that with her late husband Dr. Isaac Taylor.
“We discovered the Vineyard through the Massachusetts General Hospital,” she recalled in the Gazette interview. “My husband was the dean of the medical school there. The people who ran the Tashmoo Farm were from Mass General and they talked us into coming here.”
Isaac Taylor died in 1995.
In her long life Trudy had many passions and had traveled the world. But the Vineyard was the place she always called home. She brought plant cuttings from faraway places and with her green thumb nurtured them into lush everlasting beauties. Camellias, dwarf geraniums, Myer lemons and a fig tree all thrived alongside frogs, lizards and canaries in her dirt-floor greenhouse built from a kit. Click here to continue reading.
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