Call them Lucy and Ricky —like Lucille Ball and Ricky Ricardo on the TV comedy “I Love Lucy.”

“Yes—that’s ‘Lucy and Ricky,’ ” confirms Richard Groblewski, married for more than 36 years to his Depew High School sweetheart, the former Lucy Schmidt.

Groblewski, founder of the recent Lancaster Garden Walk, knows how to keep the good cheer going at his job at Bristol Village, an assisted-living center in Clarence. There, Groblewski knows about the therapeutic value of nature as he serves as landscaper and plant care specialist.

Gardening has worked its magic on Groblewski himself, as it’s kept his spirits up through several challenging life changes.

After the Groblewskis purchased their first home in December 1987, a flood the following spring forced him into the garden. “I had to pull everything out, and rototilled the whole front yard,” Groblewski recounts.

Groblewski, a former Erie County sheriff’s deputy assigned to the Holding Center, found that “gardening in my backyard became therapy. The stress of working in the jail disappeared as I got my hands dirty in the earth.”

With a growing family, this father of three left the department for a well-paying job in a local janitorial distributorship. But in the late 1990s, the business collapsed.

He was then recruited by chemical manufacturers and worked for a company in North Carolina. He traveled across the U. S. and Canada for two years.

He took another job in Toledo for yet another company, commuting for a year “each weekend to come back home to my family and my garden. My wife and I moved to Toledo on a one-year trial.”

Then the Ohio company cut its work force. “I lost my job— and moved back into my home, and have stayed there ever since,” said Groblewski

Groblewski started the Lancaster Garden Walk about six years ago.

“I was working a difficult job and was looking for a change,” he said. “I asked a local nursery for a chance at my dream job. To my great delight, I was offered a position as general manager, based on the owners seeing and judging my garden in the first Garden Walk. The business was then sold. After working there for one year, I was out of work once more.”

At last weekend’s Lancaster walk, with nearly 50 gardens, hundreds of visitors found his “thoroughly planted” garden in top shape, featuring a “Japanese Escape” with a tea house, and a waterfall built from Depew’s old Main Street granite sidewalk.

Have an idea about a local person whose life would make a good profile or a neighborhood issue worth exploring? e-mail

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Or write to: Louise Continelli, Sunday Profile, The Buffalo News, P. O. Box 100, Buffalo, NY 14240