A Gardeners’s Beginnings
Often gardeners say that the most endearing gift they could offer a loved one would be a bouquet of blooms from their own patch of earth–roses speaking of passion, or lilies indicating purity of the heart.
But what about dandelions? What about those crumpled, soggy bouquets of stringy stems and crushed flower? They are fervent with a child’s love and devotion. Their presentation calls up tears as it stretches back across the years, symbolizing a true gift of the heart. They could be a gardeners beginnings…though when I lived in California, I learned that dandelions don’t grow there!
For child me, the flower growing in a narrow garden by our walk in Chicago was the peony. And it became the reason that I began to love digging in the dirt. Each spring the peonies called my mother Jinni from the dining room where she typed insurance policies to raise us three kids. The two of us would sit on the front porch steps to take in the color and perfume of the eight massive bushes. The blooms were thick, rich with fragrance, bragging their colors…fuchsia, soft rose, pure white–all with large yellow centers, cabbages of color becoming pendulous in spring rains, their heads drooping like my head upon my mother’s shoulder. The best part was snipping them with a scissors and brining them inside where we filled jelly glasses with blooms that truly transformed our simple home.
CHANGE
Then when I was ten, more gardening instincts kicked in. I noticed my aunts had an everlasting garden with stepping stones. They also talked another language of breaded iris, delphinium, coreopsis, and rose scale. At our home I could almost see the grass turning brown as I stood on the lawn…the flowering bridal wreath against the porch had bloomed off leaving ragged masses of dusty green leaves. Whiz, bang, the sounds of my mother’s typewriter carriage through the open, summer window. And hours later, it happened. She listened to me, and with some money out of her budget, we bought marigolds and petunias.
My mother showed me how to plant these lovelies in a patch of soil under our dining room window–my first garden. She found time to help me pot some scarlet geraniums for the front porch and she taught me how to hook up the sprinkler and water our dusty lawn. IT WAS A START. But then as summer faded, magic happened. I gave my mother a bouquet of spicy marigolds which we carefully arranged in my grandmother’s cut glass bowl. Lovely, but not as lovely as the look in her eyes when I presented them.
PERMAENCE
I was a gardener now, like my aunts who came up the front walk on a chilly night heralding the arrival of autumn with sheaves of chrysanthemums expertly cut and wrapped in wax paper to protect their well-ironed dresses. My mother and I were thrilled with the amber ones, the maroon ones, the bright fiery yellow ones. But my brothers moaned. Autumn meant taking down the screens and putting up the heavy storm windows, and mowing expanses of covered grass. Because yes, as the sun angled away from the earth, doing those chores filled our Saturdays. But I did not need an monetary allowance to spur me on. I was learning to love this part of the cycle–the tidying up, the banking of the peony bed with leaves, the preserving of this beauty during a Chicago winter. All had purpose, finality that I did not mind…all held promise.
WINTER
During those cold months, I would gaze at the snow-encrusted world, imagining the eventual thaw and picturing the peonies parading our front walk…recreation! The spirit of gardening had taken hold of me and I learned in time that it’s a firm hold, one you give yourself to over and over. In my youth, the promise was there in the simple gifts I could give and share with my amazing mother. Yes, the flowers sang out to us, called to us with their colors and perfume, creating a relationship singular and personal, on cultivated by our very living.
Thanks for reading.
