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Rand Lee |
Payne's Nurseries
and Greenhouses
Gardens of Memory
People garden for a lot of reasons, and one of the most endearing and enduring reasons people garden is to honor loved ones who have gone before them. My younger brother Jeffrey, whom AIDS killed in 1990 when he was 35 years old, was a smart, funny, handsome, irritatingly competent person with a thing for plants. He lived with our mother in Foilnamuck, a village on the south coast of the Republic of Ireland, and in their yard he grew (among other things) dahlias and ornamental grasses. He also planted an oak tree, over the grave of his German shepherd, Jespah, who died a year before Jeff did.
I remember Jespah — when I came to visit my mother and brother in the fall of 1986, it was sweet, shy, black-and-tan Jespah who ran out to greet me first, whining and licking my face — and I remember Jeff, too, weeding his dahlias, which thrived under his care. Every year I plant dahlias in memory of both of them, this year (owing to my arthritis, which makes digging in the earth difficult) in a tub near the front door of the house I rent in Pecos.
It’s not only the dead whom gardens can commemorate. In the late 1950’s, when she was a teenager, my half-sister Jacquelin grew blue bachelor’s buttons (Centaurea cyanus) in the Connecticut garden our father and my mother had built. Whenever I encounter bachelor’s buttons, I think of Jackie, though she and I have not had a relationship in over 30 years. During the same period, in another part of our New England yard, my sister Kit — now in her sixties and dwelling in Wiltshire, England with her rakish octogenarian husband — grew forget-me-nots (Myosotis sylvestris). After all these years, they still — for me — represent the essence of her.
I remember other things, too. The scent of Poetaz narcissi, lilacs, peonies, and mockoranges (Philadelphus) instantly evoke the garden back behind my father’s study, which on warm spring mornings must have taunted his writing-room with fragrance. Red Japanese maples evoke my father, too: he always called the one he planted in our front yard his “little girl,” and fretted over it each year until his final cardiac arrest in 1971. As for my mother, who died of a broken heart a year after Jeffrey did, tea roses were her passion, and she grew them magnificently. Her favorites were ‘Chrysler Imperial’, a fragrant dark red of perfect, classic form, and ‘Peace’, which I remember, when I was a child, as having possessed a sweet fragrance (modern ‘Peace’ is virtually scentless). Or perhaps it is not ‘Peace’ that has changed, but the acuity of my nose, headed South with age like other portions of my anatomy.
I wonder who will plant flowers in memory of me, when I am gone? And what blossoms will they choose? Pansies, possibly — everyone who knows me knows that I am gay — but if so, I hope they plant the little scented violas that my mother called Johnny-jump-ups. (Look for the ‘Penny Lane Citrus Mix’ this fall; its wee, bright, white, lemon, and orange blossoms are strongly fragrant, and if you let them go to seed, their babies may well come up again next spring.) My friends Gary and Sue will probably plant pinks for me: I was a dianthus fanatic for many years, and I think the old-fashioned, clove-scented kinds — which for some reason have never sold well at the nursery — are essential to any cottage garden worth the name. Or maybe it’ll be Hall’s honeysuckle (Lonicera japonica ‘Hallsiana’), which I just plugged into the big tub to the right of my front door. I grew Hall’s for 17 years in my garden on Lujan Street in Santa Fe, before rising rents forced me northward; its offwhite flowers, which fade to old gold, are the farthest thing from showy, but, oh! Their sweetness is incomparable, and keeps coming, off and on, all summer long.
Or maybe my mourners will plant ‘Tiffany’, the only hybrid tea I’ve never been able to kill; which, despite all the books’ sniffing over its tendency to get blackspot, bloomed for me for nearly a decade in my Lujan yard with extravagant fragrance (and, till nearly the very end, entirely disease-free). Or maybe they’ll plant creeping caraway thyme (Thymus herba-barona), which medieval cooks used to lend caraway flavor to their giant beef roasts. (Scented herbs were among my first gardening enthusiasms.) Or maybe — or maybe —
Ah, well. That’s the problem: when you’re a plantaholic, you tend to love ‘way too many blooming things, which means that somebody caring to remember you post mortem might just as well plug dandelions into the soil and expect you, rightly, to be pleased. For that’s one thing for sure: when I have shuffled off this mortal coil, if there’s still a me left bodiless with wit and memory, the two things I’ll miss most from my days in physical reality will be the joyous smooch of pooches and the intricate sensuality of flowers. Those comforts no Heaven could match.
Copyright 2007 Rand B. Lee
Read some of Rand's other columns
Errors of Spring | Bulbs of Spring | Vegetable Passions