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A
Mother's
Garden
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In many areas of the country
Mother’s Day weekend coincides with the unofficial
beginning of the summertime gardening season. This
fortunate coincidence has not been lost on garden
center owners who have become quite skillful at
turning spring gardening merchandise into enticing
Mother’s Day gifts. Colorful hanging baskets,
fragrant rose bushes, perhaps a spring flowering
tree are just a few of the Mother’s Day gift
suggestions featured prominently in garden center
ads, followed by the words “The gifts that keep on
giving.”
Speaking of Mother’s Day gifts
that keep on giving….I undoubtedly owe much of my
interest in plants and gardening to my mother, who
raised a two acre garden to feed her family and a
much smaller group of flower gardens to feed her
soul. Children over the age of five were
automatically drafted into her gardening army—no
physical infirmity, no student deferment, were
sufficient grounds to avoid her all-inclusive
selective service. Thus I was opening up a furrow
and planting peas by the age of six, picking
strawberries by the age of seven, digging potatoes
by eight, and hoeing pigweeds as tall as giant
sequoias by the age of nine. By the age of ten I
was operating the primitive rear-tined tiller—now
trusted to steer it down the middle of two rows of
green beans without causing a calamitous famine in
the Meyer family.
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When neighbors and relatives
would come to visit on a summer Sunday evening,
while the men talked of crops and weather and
livestock, the women would tour the garden. It was
always a leisurely tour, focusing on new additions
to the garden, flowers in full bloom at the time,
and perhaps on those heirloom roses, peonies, or
iris with a particularly long association with the
family.
My favorite flower as a small
child was always the moss roses, as my mother called
them. They are what today we would call a “child
friendly flower”—easy to plant, tolerant of the
erratic watering and care that is the norm in a
child’s flower garden, but with bright sunny flowers
in a rainbow of colors. At some point I remember
actually being permitted the privilege of planting
some of my favorite flowers among her prize roses.
Several years ago my parents finally had to move off
the farm, and for a number of years the old
farmhouse was rented to the neighbor’s son. The
young man was clearly not a gardener, and for a few
years the garden fell into a state of neglect, much
to my mother’s consternation. But in a twist of
fate that is reflective of larger social trends, my
brother bought the family farm, and sold the
farmhouse and outbuildings to a |
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Had then President Eisenhower
spent more time protecting the welfare of children
and less time golfing, I might not have had to work
so hard in the garden as a child. But that was in
the days before child and protective services, OSHA,
and the wage and hour division of the department of
Labor…… in the days before our government knew how
harmful physical labor is to the proper emotional
and physical development of children. But even had
President Eisenhower been a more progressive thinker
in the field of child welfare, our farm was located
9 miles from the nearest town, and over ¼ of a mile
off the nearest county road, so the likelihood of
children toiling in the hot sun being observed by
any suitable law enforcement or child protective
services personnel was quite low.
Surprisingly, my mother never
required that we weed or otherwise tend her flower
beds. For some reason unknown to us children at the
time, she didn’t mind doing that work herself.
Having grown up in Texas and Oklahoma, her prized
flowers were her hybrid tea roses, and they owned
the most valuable real estate in her flower garden.
Her flower collection was traditional by today’s
standards—tulips, iris, peonies, tiger and Asiatic
lilies, roses, and for the fall, mums. Her flower
gardens were prominently located near the front
entrance to the “yard”—the fenced in space of lawn
and gardens around the house. She tended them on
summer evenings and on an occasional Sunday
afternoon.
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young
computer consultant that was trying to escape the
rat race of California with his young family.
Their first project was to get the local telephone
company to extend several broadband lines out to the
farm place, and their second project was to begin
cleaning up the gardens. I am happy to report that
young children are once again toiling under the hot
sun in the large vegetable garden, still cruelly
just beyond the reach of child protective services
personnel, and that the heirloom roses, peonies, and
irises are once again tended and flourishing.
My mother will be 95 on June
2. She now lives in an assisted living facility in
town and no longer gardens. But a few years ago the
young mother, accompanied by several of her young
gardeners, visited my mother in the assisted living
center. And much to my mother’s delight, they
presented her with a bouquet of roses, freshly cut
from the now revived roses in my mother’s garden.
This young mother wanted my mother to know how much
they are enjoying “her roses”. Some Mother’s Day
gifts do keep on giving.
Happy Mother’s Day
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