When it comes to landscaping, rose of Sharon might not be everyone’s cup of tea, but Pat Kuffmaul loves it.

The flowering bushes grew tall around much of her old house on Standish Drive, once forming a flowering tunnel on the path from her driveway to the backyard.

Friday morning, though, when a team working on United Way’s Day of Caring showed up to paint her house, things seemed to go wrong.

Volunteers, just trying to be helpful, started trimming back the plants to make room for painting, but before long Kuffmaul was distraught and ordered the volunteers from her property. Her house never got painted.

In the aftermath, Kuffmaul speaks tearfully of what happened to her beloved plants. One rose of Sharon, which bore rare yellow flowers, had been cut off at ground level, and another had been cut off about half its height. Other plants had been cut off at ground level, and part of a lilac bush had also been whacked off.

“Why did they cut that?” Kuffmaul asks, referring to some plants along her driveway, away from the house. “It has nothing to do with painting.”

Kuffmaul says she spoke to the volunteers from her porch, telling them that the bushes weren’t to be trimmed. “They were staring at me, but they weren’t seeing me and they weren’t hearing me,” she said. “I felt like I was an invisible person.”

The trimming continued despite her protests.

United Way officials were apologetic about what happened, but they said they have heard different versions of what happened, and they can’t explain exactly what led to the misunderstanding.

Jerry Peterson, president and CEO of United Way, said people with Day of Caring had met twice with Kuffmaul and explained what would be done.

Obviously, though, there was some misunderstanding between the volunteers who were sent to do the job, what their instructions were and what Kuffmaul expected to happen.

The best anyone can do is to learn from the events and make sure similar incidents aren’t repeated in the future.

What Kuffmaul wants isn’t clear. She says a simple “we’re sorry” won’t satisfy her. She said she wants some guarantee that nothing like this will ever happen to anyone again.

“That certainly is our goal,” Peterson said.

Peterson said the agency has always been careful, but misunderstandings can occur, especially when there are various agencies, businesses and people involved at different levels in dozens of projects. United Way can only try to learn from the incident and do things in the future to avoid similar situations, he said.

Not to minimize what happened with Kuffmaul, Peterson said, but Day of Caring has been going on for years, tackling dozens of different projects each year, and there have only been a handful of projects, maybe five, that resulted in distressed or unhappy people.

“There is room for misunderstanding,” Peterson said. “Assumptions can end up getting made,” and things can happen that people didn’t expect.

“We just hope this doesn’t discourage people from volunteering,” Peterson said.

Kuffmaul’s rose of Sharon bushes will, in time, grow back, including, one hopes, the one that bears the rare yellow flowers.

Meanwhile, the husband of one of the volunteers who was at Kuffmaul’s home is a professional painter, and said he has the paint for the job. He’s willing to paint it, for free, if Kuffmaul will allow it.