The Lubec couple were killed when the plane they were on struck the World Trade Center.
PORTLAND (AP) – Flowers from the garden of two Sept. 11 victims from the Down East community of Lubec will be replanted on Portland’s Eastern Promenade as part of a memorial garden.
Jacqueline and Robert Norton were on American Airlines Flight 11, which struck the north tower of the World Trade Center.
Two years after the couple died, their hostas and poppies will live on at the memorial, which honors them and six other Mainers who died that day, as well as the rescuers who died in the line of duty.
A dedication ceremony, to be held at 6:30 p.m. on Sept. 11, will be one of several remembrances across the state.
“When you have no words to express the grief, flowers always seem to say what people can’t,” said Ann Miles of Portland, who helped establish the memorial garden.
Miles and Karen Henderson of Scarborough collaborated with the city and local donors to create the memorial. Both are members of the University of Maine Cooperative Extension’s Cumberland County Master Gardeners Association.
Henderson, a landscape manager with Black Point Lawn and Landscape and mother of two children, says she couldn’t imagine what the families of the victims were going through.
“I had a sense of wanting to help provide a place for someone in that position,” Henderson said. “There are not a lot of places for someone to go and sit and just be.”
Located between Fort Allen Park and The Portland House, the garden includes a monument cut from the same black granite used for the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, D.C.
The site also includes a memorial tablet and two benches overlooking Casco Bay.
The stone is inscribed with a message written by Portland firefighters and veterans: “If but one life be saved and one soul be comforted … All gave some, some gave all, and some still give.”
Bobby Reynolds, president of the Portland firefighters’ union, says the enthusiasm expressed by Miles and Henderson in their creation of the memorial garden “was something to behold.”
Reynolds, a paramedic-firefighter, said that on 9-11, the line between heroes and victims became blurred.
“All those people became the loved and the lost,” he said.
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