Gossip in the Garden

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Over the past few months I’ve received a lot of positive comments on my post ‘Through the Eyes of Babes’, with the number one question being “How’d you ever think of that idea?”  It dawned on me this week that my grandmother was largely responsible for this, for you see, this week my grandmother passed away and I’ve had a lot of time to reflect on what she meant to me.

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My grandmother had an incredible way of looking at life through a child’s eyes.  I’ve often thought of how she nurtured my love for gardening in such subtle ways, wondering if that was her original intent or if it just came naturally to her.  For example, as a young child, when I would come to visit, she’d hand me a pair of scissors and ask me to go outside to pick a bouquet of flowers for her.  Any flowers I wanted.  That was such an exciting feeling for me, to CHOOSE which flowers I wanted with no caveats, no rules, no ‘Oh Honey – Not Those’… And no matter what I picked, or how ‘odd’ my choices might’ve been, those flowers stayed in a vase the entire time we were there.

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When I was very young, my grandmother would include me in her gardening chores by handing me her bucket of plastic flowers, and have me walk around her garden and stick them where I thought they belonged.  They were clusters of pink (kind of faded) clumps of flowers on a long wire stem, which actually looked great (to a child, at least) tucked at the base of her delphiniums, or tucked in the crevices of some rocks. Again – she made me feel so ‘important’, giving me such important decisions to make on my own.

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As I’ve thought about my years gardening with her, there are a few flowers in particular which stand out as ties between us.  Not just because of their inherent beauty, but because of the ways she incorporated them into my life.

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The Number One flower of choice has to be the Columbine. When I was about 4, we would take long walks down to the Lake (Tahoe) and would walk through a huge stand of columbines.  These were the tall ones, of varying colors, and to a little girl the flowers would be almost eyeball-high and looked like mythical creatures dancing in the wind – definitely not your ordinary flower.  I often wonder who had planted these in the middle of a Zone 1 forest, going so far as to install a huge sprinkler system (the good sounding, old fashioned kind that would spray back and forth in a rhythmic, jittery way) – totally inappropriate by today’s standards!

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A flower which she always planted to many ‘oohs’ and ‘aahs’ of neighbors who would walk by, were these huge Delphiniums.  She had the dark purple and light blue ones, and they’d grow to a towering 6′ high.  To a child, this was an enormous size, and in my eyes her garden was MAGIC.  I remember playing alone in the garden once, and some tourists walked by and asked me  if they could photograph the flowers.  I was so darn proud – as if I were the one who’d planted them!

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The next flower I would include in my bouquet would be Feverfew’s (Chrysanthemum parthenium).  These happy little flowers bloomed and re-seeded everywhere. In fact, I even have some in my own garden which came from her original bunch.  I get so excited when the first leaves emerge in Spring, crushing a few between my fingers and deeply inhaling – transporting me back in time.  Thanks to their prolific re-seeding I always end up with more than I need, and try to ‘sneak’ them into my client’s gardens in hopes of spreading the joy these little troopers bring in the hot months of Summer.

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I think my grandmother’s very favorite flower was her beautiful, deep, dark magenta Peony.  She nursed this plant along, but it never really bloomed much as it received too much shade as the Pussy Willows grew overhead.  But each year it would manage to kick out a few flowers, and when it did she just went nuts over them.  To a kid, this flower was really kind of weird.  What other bud in the garden would be allowed to be covered with ants?  And once it bloomed, it just looked like a floppy, messy flower, petals splayed in every which direction, no real order.  But to her?  It was a whole other flower and to see her light up when it bloomed made me look at it in a different way…

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My tribute wouldn’t be complete without mentioning the good, old, common-as-dirt geraniums.  My grandmother had a huge deck, with a zillion pots of geraniums which would bloom all summer long.  When I’d go up to visit, she’d have me hand-water all of the pots which I loved doing. She’d then have me pick off all of the ‘cutworms’ which were a freaky pink or yellow color (from eating the colored flowers, I guess) – another chore that I loved doing.  Kind of like an icky Easter Egg Hunt.  And what happened to the geraniums in the Zone 6 Winter?  She’d haul them all down into the basement area, loading them on a table and every other surface, under make-shift grow lights.  My poor grandfather would have to maneuver around these plants just to get to his ‘stuff’.  As children, my brother and I loved playing down there with all the humidity, greenery and life while looking out the windows which were blocked solid with snow…

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So thank you, Grandma, for showing me the beauty of nature, for making a small child feel so important, and for including me in your passion for gardening.  And thank you for taking the time to look at life through my eyes…

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