Memories From Another Place and Time
Memories From Another Place and Time
There will never be a spring when I do not remember all of the gardeners who have left their imprint on the flower beds that surround my farmhouse. Those first green shoots begin pushing their way through the half-frozen soil in early April, the last arriving around the middle of May. For six weeks I am reminded of the connection shared by all of us who tend the earth and the plants that are so much more than just green growing things taking up space in our gardens. I take inventory of everything that has survived the bleak winter months, marveling at the tenacity of tiny bulbs and rhizomes. I wonder if they are just as impressed to see that I, too, have lived to see another spring. Some were acquired in person, a shovel and plastic grocery store bags the only things necessary to obtain a new treasure. Others found their way to me when home computers made it possible for gardeners to connect with each other through online gardening forums. All of them represent people who happily shared their plants with beginners who had just begun their journey into the fascination that is gardening.
The patches of lemon-yellow daffodils were all from my mother-in-law. Over the course of 30 years she gifted me with more flowers and herbs than I can begin to recall, stopping me in mid-sentence every time I opened my mouth to thank her. Apparently the thank you would keep the plants from growing in their new locations and she was quick to keep that from happening. No more information was ever supplied on this belief, and she spoke with such conviction that I never inquired. Still, I found it impossible to keep my gratitude to myself, and she never failed to shush me with every gift from her garden. I have never met a more generous woman in my life. I think that was part of the reason that her gardens were so beautiful. She was always digging up plants and giving them away, leaving room for new roots to grow and space for the sun to reach the soil.
The allium, with its purple-edged leaves, were a gift from someone I have been corresponding with via the internet for over 20 years. The fact that our friendship began in an organic gardening forum as Gardenz and Buffalogal still makes me smile. Linda and I have never met or even spoken, our friendship blossoming through letters, emails, cards and gift boxes. The fact that we both landed in the same cyberspace at the same time has always felt arranged by the Divine. We share an uncanny ability to truly understand each other in the written word as well as in the silence that exists at times. What began with us bonding over our commitment to organic practices has continued because of our mutual affection for the chipmunks, squirrels, and birds that have made our gardens their home.
Several varieties of iris are here because of another internet friendship. Marlys has since passed away, but she and I were able to meet in person at her home in South Dakota during our family vacation to Mt. Rushmore. Leaving my husband and kids back at the hotel, I drove the 45 minutes to her home. I hadn’t realized that she was an iris collector of monumental proportions until I walked into her back yard. Within minutes of my arrival, her spade was in the ground and her black ink pen was gliding over the smooth foliage as she wrote down the names, height, and colors of each plant. An hour and a half later I closed the lid of my now overflowing trunk, wondering where on earth we would put our luggage. I waved goodbye to this sweet lady who was homebound due to her husband’s failing health. Her generosity and her ability to find joy in her gardens despite the hardships in her life inspire me still.
A third internet friend, after several months of corresponding about every plant imaginable, confided in me that he was dying. His wife did not share his love of gardening, and he knew that his beloved plants would not be taken care of after he was gone. Would I be willing to take some of his plants was his simple request from several states away. The large cardboard box arrived two weeks later, roots wrapped carefully in damp newspaper. These plants that Bill called perennial sunflowers are rogue wanderers that threaten to take over every inch of unoccupied space on the west side of my house. I threaten to dig them up each spring and move them to a wilder area, but I have yet to actually do it. The truth is that I need the reminder that even though our time here is limited, our influence is not.
Seed exchange forums were a thing back then, too. Maybe they still are. For a beginning gardener, trading seeds was an inexpensive way to acquire new flowers and it felt a bit like playing the lottery. For the price of a postage stamp, you could acquire seeds for dozens of vegetables, flowers and herbs. It was addictive and I gathered seeds of my own each fall so I would have something to barter with during January and February. One particular gardening friend sent me several kinds of flower seeds all neatly labeled, with one small Ziploc baggie labeled ‘mystery seed’. She asked me to let her know what the seeds grew into, and I assured her that I would. I was positive that I had hit the jackpot and that they would turn out to be something beautiful and rare. The seeds were sown in a special area of my garden so I could monitor them and keep track of their growth. To my delight, they germinated quickly, and I waited patiently for them to grow, bloom, and eventually reveal their identity. I watered them with sun-warmed well water whenever we didn’t receive adequate rainfall and fertilized them with rabbit manure tea, making sure any undesirable plants did not encroach and impede their progress. All of this was pre-smart phone and before plant ID apps existed. As the seedlings grew, they began to look familiar. I enlisted my husband, a farmer from birth, to help identify my mystery plants. “That’s ragweed”, he said unceremoniously. I refused to believe it and continued to pamper the seedlings until they were two feet tall and there was no question about it. Ragweed. I sent an email to my gardening friend, informing her of my discovery. She was unnecessarily apologetic, explaining that the day she had gathered the seeds had been her last day at her mother’s home. Her mom had passed months earlier, and having recently sold her home, this had been my friend’s last day to take any plants that had belonged to her mother. She described a harried scene, digging and bagging up everything she hoped to save that had been in her mom’s garden. We both laughed about the unexpected turn of events, both of us knowing that the laugh was so much better than any plant that might have grown.
I thought I understood at the time how she must have felt, but I know now that you have to be in the middle of that kind of moment to fully realize how it feels to know that there is an actual date on the calendar and that a clock is ticking down on a time when the door that connects you to the last living things that belonged to your mother will close forever. It throws you into a desperate space of grasping at everything and anything, knowing you can sort it all later. Even dry, unidentifiable seed heads have their place in this frenetic race to salvage the only things left to save. It’s what we gardeners do to keep the spirits of the people we’ve loved alive and still within our reach.
The floral teacups that belonged to my mother are special, but they will never be cherished in the same way as the poppies and peonies. The yellow iris growing next to her house will be coming home with me one of these days. And the purple iris that line the ditch will be, too. A neighbor had stopped by a year before my mom passed away, asking if she might move them to a location closer to the house where my mom could see them better. At 94, my mother had stopped caring what anyone thought of her. “I wish you wouldn’t!” she snapped, scowling at the woman from behind her screen door. She was certain that the woman was only offering so that she could take some for herself, and there was no convincing her that this woman had only wanted to do a good deed. How do you leave that sort of memory behind?