the garden grown, the garden remembered

There are so many things I wish I’d shared from the garden this summer. In a summer garden, each day is its own painting, the colors and forms shifting as one bloom falls away and a new one takes its place, as new leaves and tendrils emerge overnight.

In early June, my hollyhocks were beautiful, splendid even - I had nearly every color I’ve ever wanted this year - - but the rain that helped them along was ultimately their downfall, too, as they developed such bad fungal rust that I just couldn’t keep them and by July I had torn them all out and replaced them with cosmos which I transplanted from the lower garden. And so the focus shifted from the towering hollyhocks to the more subtle and delicate sweetpeas and morning glories, winding their way up the teepee trellises. By mid summer, the sweetpeas were waning, and the snapdragons and zinnias and four-o-clocks were in their element, taking the heat in stride, and attracting swarms of pollinators and grasshoppers. Nettie spent hours watching striped caterpillars slowly inch along the dill stalks, determined to discover how they made their crysallis.

I take flowers to my grandma in the nursing home every week. The first bouquets of the season were small and humble, flowers that Nettie and I had to scrounge for, and could only fill a spice jar. They grew a little each week, and now, at the height of the zinnias, she receives a very large bunch, mixed with cosmos and snapdragons and great seedheads of fennel and fragrant white phlox.

“I used to raise lots of flowers,” she always says, vaguely. She can’t remember, anymore, exactly which flowers she raised. She often asks the names of each flower I’ve brought. I show her photos of my gardens, which she has never visited. “Ohhh, isn’t that pretty?” she says. She has Nettie get out the envelope of photographs she keeps in her nightstand. In a stack of photos that spans nearly 90 years, are a few over-exposed pictures of one of her gardens, perhaps from the ‘70s or ‘80s. I can recognize zinnias, and marigolds, and if I squint and use my imagination, four-o-clocks.

There is something that I’m trying to say, but can’t articulate, and so I keep hoping that if I bring all the pieces together, I will make the connection. It has to do with the garden, with flowers, with growing and sharing flowers, with the memory of flowers. It has to do with my grandmother. And with my mom, and my daughter. But also with my neighbor down the road, who doesn’t dare step out on her back steps, for fear of falling and having to be moved to a nursing home. She raised flowers, she gave me the German iris which grow along my fence, the same irises I can remember on the altar of my childhood church. I take her flowers every few weeks, and she, too, lightly touches the blooms and asks what some of them are, and I try to tell her in a voice that is loud enough for her to hear. And it has to do with my other grandma who has been gone for almost 15 years, and who I never really knew that well, who used to fuss over a few rose plants which seemed scraggly to me, and who once brought me a single pink rose bloom in a juice glass to the house where I lived as a newlywed, and I didn’t appreciate it at the time. Didn’t understand the joy that bloom had brought her, or that she had wanted to share that joy and beauty with me.

These are the pieces - I can feel what I want to say, what I want to communicate - but I can’t write it. All I can say is that the garden, the flowers, they link us, through time and place. They are part of a collective memory - of color, of scent, of the feel of a petal on our fingertips or pressed to our lips. Like a humming moth that lights and darts from one trumpet of the four-o-clock to the next, showing itself only in motion, in shadow - I can only gesture at what it all means, how it all fits. All I know is that there were flowers once, and I grew them - you grew them - she grew them - we all did, once.

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Postscript

In college, I took a poetry class. It was life-changing, in a way, because it was the first time I thought of myself as creative. It would be several years before I tried any visual art, but writing those poems opened up something for me. I realized I had stories to tell, and I’ve been trying to tell them ever since, though not so often in poetry, these days. This was the first poem I wrote for that class, our assignment was a sonnet. My sonnet is modified, with an added fifteenth line.

Mirabilis

“When nothing else subsists from the past, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered….. the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls….. bearing resiliently, on tiny and almost impalpable drops of their essence, the immense edifice of memory.” — Marcel Proust

First flower she learns to name, four o’clocks

form the border of her mother’s garden. Strange

blooms stay shut all day, finally unlock

funnel-shaped flowers as sun sinks low, change

erupting with dew in the grass. Sweetness sweeps

deep on cool breeze, flutters curtains, hovers heady,

draws from drowsy dishes hushed house half-asleep

mother and child, chattering into the blue night, giddy

trips to the garden where humming moths sink,

spin in nectar-kissed kinesis between rows.

Four o’clocks ogle the moon, gold and pink

blossoms-turned-blue that the child plucks, twirls, throws

away, silk corpses crushed underfoot. Spent

petals, perfume linger when they wake, glint

like memory of dreams, lost at the moment

of waking.

flower crown moments

A few days ago Dave offered to take Nettie to the zoo for the morning, and I decided to stay home and make flower crowns. Another mom might have waited to do that when her children were home to help, but I wanted to enjoy it. So I did it by myself. I'm not even going to qualify that.

I was inspired via Instagram by a lovely friend from the Netherlands, who shared photos of her boys in their flower crowns. They were celebrating solstice. I was late to the party, as usual. Actually I just never go to parties. But, as my friend pointed out, with all my garden flowers, I would be able to make a very nice crown for Nettie. I have what I'm calling a "cutting garden" this year, which means that I have flowers that look good once they are removed from my poorly-planned, overcrowded, mess of a garden. I have been bringing in and giving away as many as I can, because they're not particularly picturesque where they are, except from just the right angle.

My hollyhocks, circa June 6-7, 2017.

The same hollyhocks, circa June 30, 2017. Rest in peace.

My beds looked good for oh, I'd say about two days, after which time a string of thunderstorms toppled, crippled, or maimed all but one of my hollyhocks, which are now also ravaged by rust or scab or some other horrifying derma-botana-logical condition which has made them so unsightly that even though they are still blooming in an amazing variety of colors, I'm very close to cutting them all back and being done with the whole thing.

My herbs are out-of-control, which is apparently the state of herbs. You either don't have them or you have scads of them and have to start pulling out everything you see. I found mint in my sweet peas yesterday that was four feet tall. I think that must be some sort of record. The Bells of Ireland, which I was so happy to see coming up on their own this spring, are lying in the most unsightly way, their stems splayed in every direction, the bells coated with mud. Cilantro has gone to seed everywhere and the poppies have popped and popped until frankly, I'm sick of their weak, bobbing heads and their petals dropping all over the place. I've pulled thousands of volunteer morning glories. Thousands. They just keep coming, winding their sneaky little tentacles around the spindly necks of my phlox and autumn clematis.

But flower crowns.

They're so romantic and whimsical, like something from a fairy-tale or a dream. Because who, in real life, has time to make a flower crown, and who, in real life, is going to wear one? Outside of a wedding or something, I really don't know. They seem so frivolous. You can only wear one once, and then the flowers shrivel up and all you can do is maybe hang it on the wall for nostalgia. And honestly, I knew there was no chance that Nettie was going to wear hers for more than a few minutes, hopefully just long enough to snap a few photos. So it's kind of a flaky way to spend your time, right?

That's how I felt about my "flower crown moment" for most of the week. A little flaky. I mean, I wanted to have fun, but most of the time I was working on the crown I was feeling guilty that I didn't go to the zoo with Nettie. And then Dave called me from the zoo to tell me that one of my very best lady-friends was at the zoo with her three little boys who are under four, and I felt a whole lot guiltier. I mean, there she was momming it up hardcore, and here I was at home in my quiet house, making a blasted flower crown.

Actually I didn't stop with Nettie's crown. Despite the guilt, I ended up being so inspired that I made a few tiny crowns for some little felted mice, (talk about frivolous), and I shared photos on Facebook and Instagram. People really liked them. Like, a lot. More than they've liked anything I've posted recently. And I'm pretty sure it was the flower crowns that people liked, not so much the mice. Strangely, not a single person complained that I was being flaky.

So I've been thinking about why a flower crown has so much appeal, what it is that we're responding to. Then I looked at the photos again and thought, "Oh, Rosanna, stop making everything so complicated. They're just pretty, that's all." And they are pretty, even beautiful. Not in a complex way. Not because of composition or lighting or design. They're just pretty flowers that will be faded tomorrow. And sometimes, that's what makes something beautiful: the transience. The impermanence. The frivolousness of something spent just for beauty's sake. That's why I garden, and why I'll try again next year, even if I only enjoy my beds for two days. I have spent so much of my adult life working toward something, and never stopping once I get there, to enjoy it. It's such a sad way to live, never celebrating, never being frivolous.

I'll be making more flower crowns, for Nettie, for felted animal friends, for myself, maybe others. And I'm going to try not to feel guilty. We don't need more guilt. We need more flower crowns, or at least flower crown moments.