WESTBOROUGH – Lillian Grove, “The Blueberry Lady of Denny Brook Farm,” managed the popular pick-your-own blueberry business at 140 South Street with strict rules. Lil actually had “spies” among the bushes who made sure you stripped your assigned bush and didn’t wander off looking for better “pickins.”
Row upon row, high blueberry bushes dripped with artfully draped mosquito netting, shielding the plump berries underneath. From the far side of the bushes wafted juicy gossip, its source a tantalizing mystery.
Favorite recipes for blueberry buckle, blueberry grunt, blueberry pandowdy, blueberry turnovers, and blueberry upside down cake were exchanged among the pickers in the patch.
Decked out with mosquito netting hanging from her own hat and always clad in boots, the diminutive Lil knew her patch like the back of her hand. She was lively, generous and widely admired for her independent spirit. In May 1953 Lil and her husband Gil bought the historic 1725 home of Asher Rice.
According to their next-door neighbor Janet Harvey, age 92, “It takes about three to six years before the bushes produce, depending on the different varieties of blueberries. At one time the Groves also raised Hereford cattle,” she added.
In the sixties, Lil and Gil would pick the berries themselves, then call their list of loyal customers to pick up the berries at their front door. Lil, who had met Gil at the New England Conservatory of Music, recorded a musical telephone answering machine message. It opened with the first line from the Fats Domino song, “Blueberry Hill,” sung by Lil in her beautiful soprano voice, remembered Julia Thurber Candon.
“When he wasn’t raising blueberries, Gil Grove was a fine jazz musician,” added Candon. “For many years he was a composer and the conductor of Westborough’s Hundredth Town Chorus.”
From the 1960s until Lil’s death in 2018, Denny Brook Farm was a major source of Westborough’s blueberries. There were no ads: only a banner appliqued with a giant blueberry that hung from the fence post. Once that banner flew, no further notice was needed. It was blueberry season at Denny Brook Farm!
From 7 a.m. on, customers hugging their berry pots lined up eagerly along the South Street fence to be admitted.
“After you got your berry pot weighed and marked with masking tape or had last year’s label verified,” remembered Marge Fisher, “Lil gave you a ‘picking can’ with a string attached to wear around your neck. This made a convenient berry catcher that you then dumped into your own pot when it was full,” said Fisher.
It’s fortunate that the pickers themselves weren’t weighed on the way in and on the way out of the patch, as their buckets were. You hoped Lillian could overlook the blue outline around your lips—telltale evidence of the berries that never made it to your pot.
After Gil Grove died in 1983, Lil’s nephew Roy Rogers helped her manage the pick-your-own business. In recent years, two new homes have replaced the Denny Brook Farm berry patch.
“I know of at least one instance when cuttings were allowed to be taken from the berry bushes after Lil passed away,” said Fisher. “Those cuttings are now being husbanded in their garden–I suspect that there may be other Grove blueberry offspring thriving elsewhere in town.”
