Written on a cold winter day:
Today, January 3rd, in the mail, I received my first seed catalog. Leafing through the pages, I was reminded of my mother’s love affair with her flowers. The family always had a large vegetable garden to feed nine people, but Mother’s true pleasure came from the flowers she nurtured. From the early sixties, at Ray, Ohio, I remember the begonias, coleus, geraniums and sultanas (now called impatiens) that she planted on either side of the front steps. They grew into profuse bushes in the early morning shade and wilted in the intense afternoon sun. She watered them using the metal bucket and dipper faithfully every evening, despite the other chores that a family of nine created. Visitors always commented on them and few left without a start of the plants. At the end of the season in the fall, she potted many of the little starts and took them inside the house. They grew slowly in the cool, sunless winter days. But when spring came, they quickly sprouted new leaves and were soon ready to be transplanted in the beds, starting the cycle for her all over again.
Houseplants, mainly philodendron, were always plentiful in her home. One year at Ray, the plant vined so much that she let it grow along nails she placed all over one living room wall. One of our Saturday chores was washing and polishing the many leaves. When she moved from the farm to the condo, she took a philodendron in a five gallon pot with her. She had it staked with a wooden slat and tied with twine. That was one thing about her gardening- she used whatever was available for a stake regardless of the appearance to the plant. At the condo, the plant continued to climb and wind around the stake, and she worried daily what she should do with it. It needed transplanted, but into what and how would she do it. I finally convinced her that she could just trim it back and let it start over. Mother cut most of the plant away, but it was never the same. I think she let it decline as she was doing herself. She could no longer care to water or feed the plant. When her furniture and belongings were divided, Carol took the philodendron and added it to her plethora of houseplants.
Mother spent most of her life on a small farm near Willard, Ohio. When we moved there in the early 1960s, the place was truly depressing. Junk everywhere. The house needed lots of work. My parents set to work right away cleaning the place up. Translated, that meant lots of work for us kids. There was lots of space between the house and the barn for a vegetable garden. While we hoed the beans on hot afternoons, it seemed like acres. Mother kept room for her flowers, though. Along the west edge near the apple tree, she planted orange poppies that bloomed every spring. One summer, she planted several rows of dahlias along the garden path that led to the barn. The showiest ones were the large dinner plate dahlias. They were wine colored (her word), yellow, and velvety red. Mother knew just how to arrange the plants for the best effect. When visitors pulled around the curve of the driveway, they could not help but see their beauty. The dahlias gave her great pleasure as well as frustration. The bulbs had to be dug every fall, tagged and stored in the basement after the first frost. The tagging was the hardest part. She did not have plastic tags we can get now at any nursery, but instead used an old white sheet torn into strips. Each strip had the color and size written on it with magic marker then was wrapped around its group of bulbs. Needless to say, sometimes in the spring, she had to deal with surprises since the cool dampness of the dirt basement was not the best environment for maintaining legible markings on the cloth. She often had to guess at color and size which led to a great variation in the color arrangement in the garden. When she began to set the bulbs out in the spring, she always saved some to pass along to friends and relatives. If you admired one of her dahlias, she had the bulbs to send home with you.
As the farm took shape, Mother was able to focus her attention to placing beds of plants and shrubs around the house. I remember the many flower and seed catalogs that came in January and how she spent hours planning her order. I loved her excitement. Her roses were from Jackson & Perkins. Unless she went to the greenhouse and could not resist a certain color. Other plants and seeds came from Burpees. Unless she went to the local greenhouse and saw a certain plant she couldn’t resist. As the years passed, a variety of perennials were available at greenhouses like Corso’s.
In the spring, she bought primroses and pansies. For the summer, she first bought begonias, impatiens and marigolds. Columbines, lupines, sweet william, hollyhocks, lilies and coneflowers and black eyed susans began to fill in a lot of spaces. The advantage to her was that the perennials came up every year and reproduced profusely. She would just thin out the new plants in the spring and start a new bed or find an empty spot. I don’t think she ever thinned them and threw them away. Another way Mother got plants was to start them from seeds that she gathered each fall. The seeds were dried and put in some sort of container-tins or in little white rags tied in bunches. Many zinnias and marigolds got their start in the big old washtub. Mother loved mums in the fall but became aggravated that they soon lost their exotic colors to the original white or yellow. In the spring, she loved all the colors of the irises, but hated dividing the bulbs and pulling the nasty grass from between the rows.
One year she bought a small greenhouse. Together we bought packets of seeds and spent spring evenings filling the little pots with soil and pressed the seeds into the soil. We had flat after flat of all the varieties of our dreams. My brother Ralph built shelves to hold the flats of pots. He also rigged a heater for cool nights. We waited anxiously for the seedlings to arrive. They finally did -all at once. So many plants! Tall and spindly as if reaching for the sun. We had to thin and rotate and water. As they grew, we realized we only needed a small amount of them for ourselves. I think we gave plants to everyone we knew. We used the greenhouse for several years. I’m not sure why we stopped. I think we had enough. I know that I never had a place for all those plants and realized I did it to help her. And she did it to help me.
At any time of the day, Mother could be found doing some kind of work in her flowers. For the hot sun she conceded to wearing a straw hat and a long sleeve shirt to ”keep her freckles away”. She did not wear gloves. If you visited her, she had to wash up for you. Any visit included a tour of her flower gardens. She had to show off a new variety or just any thing that was in bloom always offering a start of this or that She forever pushed those begonias at me, but I still don’t like them even if they are red and double. While she showed me around the other flowers, she continued to work and plan -pulling a weed here and there or wondering where to transplant overcrowded plants or some worry about a plant that wasn’t thriving. She is the only person I know that demanded her money back if a rose or peony or lily did not produce. Not only at a greenhouse but thru letters to J&P and Burpee’s. And she got satisfaction.
Over the years, Mother’s flowers grew far and wide. Not only into all the beds that she placed here and there in the yard and garden, and around the house and garage, but in my gardens and every garden of friends and relatives.
As I work in my own flower beds, I think of her. The wind waves the pink cosmos and I remember that she called them standing cyphers. When I get a whiff of the sweet william near the front door, I remember that she gave it to me. As I watch the humming birds on the coneflowers, I am reminded of her full, wild gardens at the farm.
Each spring at the greenhouse, I still buy something just for her.
