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.
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.
trouble spots :: a recalculation
In the dirt patch
beside the garage door, a string
of yellow crocus bloom
where my mother planted them,
the only horticultural attempt
that has survived there
in the clay soil and baking sun.
Heedless to the cat piles
and last season’s weeds that clutter
their bed, they form a phalanx
of spindle-legged soldiers
marching into spring
with no flutter of pretense,
no encouragement, not even water.
And when we smile in passing,
they nod to say Of course. My pleasure.
Pretty, right? The flowers? Now I have to show you this. These are the same flowers and the same nosy cat.
With the spring-like weather we've been having, my crocus came up early this year. Look how silly they are. I love them for their resiliency and cheerfulness, but just LOOK where they have to stand. What a mess. This is one of my trouble spots. I have a lot of them. Some of them are mental or emotional. Some of them are on or in my body. And some of them, like this one, are beside my garage. It's a place in my life where things just don't want to fall in line with the rest of the narrative. Or they don't quite measure up. I think we all have them. They're the spots in your landscape where you plant things and plant other things and try something hardy and "low-maintenance," then go back to the original thing again, but nothing takes. Like this spot.
I wanted you to be able to see it just how it really looks in person. Because from the right distance and angle, and in the right light, it can look better than this. But that's kind of an "alternative fact," if you know what I mean. Some people might want to believe it's the reality, but it's not actually a good representation of what exists in the real world.
This bed is the ugliest spot around my house right now, and has been for four years. It irks me to no end. Mostly because it's so visible. I have to walk by it several times every day. As you can see, the only thing that has taken are these crocus that my mom "threw in the ground," the first fall we lived here. (My mom never "plants." She only "throws" bulbs, seed, and live plants in the ground, with surprisingly good results.) The rest of the bed is a scrabble of old mulch, weeds, and dusty clay soil that the cats use as a litter box. And it's southfacing, against the white siding of the garage, so it gets scorching hot.
I wonder sometimes if these "trouble spots" would be better off if we just stopped focusing on them and didn't care so much. Or tried to see them with fresh eyes. Originally I was hoping for something like this.
Haha. Pinterest strikes again! Maybe unrealistic expectations have interfered with my ability to be practical about what's possible. But as I study this picture, I'm noticing the flower pots set into the landscape to add a bit of color. And that's an idea. My grandma always kept, and still keeps, a jumble of mismatched planters outside her back door. It isn't the prettiest arrangement, but she's able to keep something blooming in a spot that is otherwise hard-packed dirt and rubbish, too inhospitable to grow anything but bindweed.
Container planting might be the tack this year. It's not a big investment in time or money and it will save me digging around in a minefield of cat poo. I'll have to work around the crocus, of course. You have to admire anything that can do so much with so little.
Whenever Grandma has a spot that she doesn't like, she turns it into a "beauty spot." She might decorate with silk flowers or solar lights or garden flags. Or she puts twinkle lights around it. My Grandma is 92 and full of wisdom, though sometimes I can dismiss it as quirkiness. But there's really nothing foolish or quirky about choosing to enjoy what you can have, and letting go of what you can't. That's preserving one's sanity. Now I'm not quite ready to resort to silk flowers yet, but I'll let you know how things come out with my newly recalculated expectations.
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