TO THE LETTER (AND THE NUMBER)

Meet Joseph Doboszynski: Sign Maker

By Felix Carroll

Joseph Doboszynski climbs down a set of steps, clicks on basement lights, settles in at a makeshift workstation, adjusts his eyes, and reacquaints himself with a couple of old-fangled machines, one of which resembles a World War IIera cipher device. Yes, the label man has arrived, and he’s ready to name names — beginning with Cotinus coggygria. (That would be “Smokebush” for the Latin oblivious among us.)

Fun fact: Berkshire Botanical Garden features more than 3,000 species and varieties of herbaceous and woody plants. Another fun fact: Berkshire Botanical Garden has endeavored to label each species and variety.

That’s a lot of labels, a lot of Latin. And because the Garden is ever-changing, it’s a never-ending task.

Enter Joseph, a retired engineer with a proclivity for pocket protectors, an orderly workstation and volunteering at institutions that inspire him. At Berkshire Botanical Garden he’s been the overseer of appellations for the past six years.

Know thee by thy name — oh, yes. “You always feel you know something better when you have a name for it,” says Lauretta Harris, president of BBG’s Volunteer Association. “So Joe’s labeling program not only informs our visitors but also helps us forge a stronger bond with them.” For Lauretta, the name “Joseph Doboszynski” has become synonymous with “loyal, dependable, hard-working, and just plain pleasant.”

His work each year begins in the dead of winter when BBG emails him the first of several flora lists.

Once he arrives on site, his first order of business is to calibrate and re-adjust the sometimes-finicky assemblage of equipment kept in the Center House basement.

Joseph creates BBG’s ubiquitous plastic black labels (with the etched white lettering) using what’s known as an M40 ABC Gravo-Graft, a rotary engraving machine typically found in trophy shops. Those labels are made from surf-board sized sheets that he cuts down to size at his home workshop.

He also creates the metal tags you see appended to woody plants (trees, shrubs and vines). We call them “accession tags.” For those, Joseph uses a vintage Addressograph, a graphotype machine typically used to make military dog tags. That machine, an iron beast patented in 1917, gives a thunderous ka-chunk-ka-chunk, as if Zeus himself is typing an angry letter to the editor.

When complete, both the plastic labels and the accession tags include the Latin and common flora names. The metal tags also include mysterious numbers that signify the date each was planted — for internal record-keeping purposes.

The need for labels and tags can require Joseph’s weekly attention. He recently made new labels for BBG’s famous Daylily Walk. That’s about 220 labels alone.