Joan Aileen Whitlock, née Slinger, of Belfast, Maine, died on June 17, 2026, at the age of 93. A gardener by birth and by spirit, a devoted wife and mother, and a compassionate pioneer of hospice care, Joan lived a life that began among the flowers of the Mourne Mountains and came full circle in a Maine garden by the sea. 

She was born on November 18, 1932, in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and grew up in the seaside town of Newcastle, County Down, at the foot of Slieve Donard. Joan was a daughter of Rebecca (“Ruby”) and Leslie S. Slinger, proprietor of the renowned Slieve Donard Nursery — one of the most celebrated nurseries in the British Isles, famed for its prize-winning daffodils, its hardy “Donard” escallonias, for raising the seedling behind the beloved winter shrub Mahonia × media ‘Charity’, and grafting the first Lynwood Gold Forsythia.  Joan grew up immersed in that world of plants, and it shaped the whole of her life. 

Her childhood unfolded against the backdrop of the Second World War. She was a young girl when the bombs fell on Belfast during the Blitz, and eleven years old when the U.S. Fifth Infantry Division trained in the Mourne Mountains above her home in the months before D-Day. From 1944 she traveled by train to Down High School in Downpatrick, a short walk from the ancient grave of Saint Patrick. 

In 1951 Joan made history of her own: she entered the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh as the first woman accepted to pursue its Diploma in Horticulture. It was in Edinburgh that she met a young American scholar, Baird Whitlock, then completing his doctorate. They married on February 16, 1953, beginning a partnership of seventy years and a life spent crossing oceans and continents. 

As Baird’s academic career carried the family from campus to campus, Joan built a home — and raised four children — in a remarkable succession of places: the University of Vermont; Colby College in Maine, where Christopher was born; Case Western in Cleveland, where Ian and Alison were born; and San Francisco State, where Erik arrived. From there the family moved on to the University of Wyoming, Elmira College in New York, and Great Barrington, Massachusetts, where Baird served as president of Simon’s Rock College and Joan presided over its dinners and gatherings. She was, in the language of her era, a “faculty wife,” but the phrase scarcely captures her: she was the steady center of a busy household, a gracious host, and, whenever it was needed, a contributor to the family’s livelihood. 

Wherever the family lived, Joan gave herself to the wider community. She was an active volunteer and fund-raiser in the churches that rooted her life in every town. In Elmira, she was a founding member of F.I.S.H. (Friends in Service Helping), a neighbor-to-neighbor volunteer network; and in Great Barrington, she lent her voice as a Reader for “Reading for the Blind.” 

After 2 years in Andover, MA, the family moved to Wichita Falls, Texas in 1978, and there Joan gave her community what may be her most enduring gift. With her friend Elsa Galbraith, she founded Hospice of Wichita Falls in the early 1980s — after caring for dying friends and recognizing how deeply the region needed compassionate end-of-life care. What the two women began now serves twelve counties of North Texas, a living testament to her conviction that no one should face death without dignity and comfort. 

In 1989 Joan and Baird retired to Belfast, Maine — a return, in name and in spirit, to the Belfast of her birth. So central had hospice work become to her that, when the couple were choosing where to spend their later years, one of Joan’s firm requirements was that the town have a hospice program. In Maine she helped coordinate the newly opened hospice unit at Waldo County General Hospital, served as president of Hospice Volunteers of Waldo County in the 1990s, and remained on its board for many years. She recruited and guided volunteers so that patients and families had support seven days a week, and she quietly took many of the duty shifts herself — the gentle, calm presence in the family room who would listen to a distraught relative, or sit and hold the hand of a patient who had no one else to visit them. When she had given all of this, she retired at last to the thing she had loved first and longest — her garden. 

Joan died on June 17, 2026, herself held in the care of hospice — the same gentle and dignified passage that she had spent so much of her life making possible for others. 

Her husband of seventy years, Baird W. Whitlock, died in October 2023. She is survived by her four children, Christopher (Mary Flannery), Ian (Lora Keenan), Alison (the late Scott Melvin), and Erik (Mary Cline); her eight grandchildren, Connor, Natalie, Garret, Tessa, Grace, James “Jake”, Zachary, and Martha “Dylan”; and her four great-grandchildren, Calvin, Carson, Carter, and Nora. 

A memorial service will be held at St. Margaret’s Episcopal Church in Belfast, Maine, on Tuesday, July 14, at 2pm, followed by a reception.   In lieu of flowers, the family suggests donations in Joan’s memory to Hospice Volunteers of Waldo County, ME (https://hospicevolunteersofwaldocounty.org/want-to-help/#donate) and/or Hospice of Wichita Falls, TX (https://www.howf.org/donate/). 

Memories and condolences may be shared with the family at ripostafh.com.