Claire Marie Bruno died on June 29, 2022 in Southern Pines, North Carolina. Just a week prior, she was shouting out all the answers to a parlor game, often forgetting which side she was on, as she celebrated her 75th birthday with her family in Holden Beach.
Claire grew up in upstate New York, birthed babies, and found horticulture in Massachusetts; then, she planted roots and thousands of trees in Moore County, NC. She made her life’s work in numerous ways, all honoring her connection with nature. She trained and broke yearling horses for the racing circuits of the Northeast. She founded New View Landscape and Design as the principal architect, more often helping people cultivate their (her) ideal garden than charging them and gave opportunity, skill, and a sense of purpose to her employees. She entertained a career as an educator, breathing life into the horticulture program at Pinecrest High School. While her methods may not have been conventional, she poured her love of plants into each student that came into her classroom, most often teaching them the tenets of real life as opposed to the dusty curriculum of traditional schooling.
Claire’s passion for plants came second to her love of horses, which began in childhood. This love brought her on adventures up and down the east coast from Florida to New York, from working with racehorses to mucking stalls for lessons. In 2009, she bought the horse of her dreams, Bugsy. Claire and Bugsy meandered, gallivanted, galloped, jumped, and most excitingly, competed, together. She proudly displayed her ribbons for all who cared to admire them, and meticulously checked Hoofbeats in the hopes that she and Bugsy would be featured. Claire’s last moments were spent with her beloved companion.
If you were to ask Claire about her greatest accomplishment in life at any point over the last 50 years, she would not stutter or pause to think but steadfastly say “my children”. Claire raised four children on her own, working tirelessly, yet ensuring they had tenfold in love to which she could provide them in sustenance. That love seemingly multiplied by the time her grandchildren came into this world. Never missing an opportunity to spend time with her grandbabies, she’d often insist they wake her at daybreak so they could eat powdered donuts and play before their parents woke up.
Claire was most at peace at her home on Baker Road with her husband, David, and her dog, Summer, who was often as disheveled as her car, with pruning shears on her hip, cultivating her ever-changing garden adorned with solar powered lights of fairies and unicorns. Claire and David enjoyed winding down their evenings by swimming in the pond, admiring the hummingbirds, and watching the sun set over the crop of the season.
Claire viewed life through floral tinted lenses, she turned dreams into passions and chased them until the sun. Moved to the beat of her own drum, leaving all dance floors much worse for wear. Swam upstream and against currents, with the leisure and levity of a lazy river lounge. Never one to accept the status quo, but a progressive who constantly pushed forward and demanded the ultimate and best of the world. She worked harder than any person her family had ever met. Her strength of form was unimaginable, capable of physical feats that boggled modern medicine, her peers and anyone who happened to enter the sphere of her endeavors. Claire’s intellect was as sharp as her tongue, her bluntness wasn’t biased but neither was her kindness. She was most comfortable with the hurt, the poor, the broken, and the marginalized. She eschewed formality; she was a whirling dervish, impossible to ignore, impossible to keep up with, a patron saint of lost causes and of wandering souls.
Of those supremely blessed to be touched by Claire, her greatest accomplishment and love in her own eyes was her family. Her husband and partner of 20 years, David Keith. Her siblings Jeanne, Richie, Noreen, Warren, and Starr. Her five children – Miguel, Jason, Raven, Kateri, and Gabriel. The grandchildren she and David poured their love into – Sam, Will Scarlet, Mia, Sabine, Mason, Wyatt, Elena, Rivera, Emmanuel, and the newest addition, Baker.
The spirit within us will be forever lifted by her love.
Funeral services will be held at Bethesda Presbyterian Church on Saturday, July 16, at 11:00 am. Gathering to follow at the home she shared with her husband David, on Baker Road in Vass.
Online condolences may be made at www.bolesfuneralhome.com
Service arrangements have been entrusted to Boles Funeral Home.
