She Who Gardens Is Not Always a Gardener...

I am not a gardener. My mom was a gardener-- she had a green thumb, not just an olive green thumb, or even a grass green thumb, but a deep, lush emerald green thumb.

Her whole life, even when she worked outside the home full-time, which was most of the time, she had a passion for her gardens. She grew trees, shrubs, perennials, annuals, vegetables, fruits... you name it, she grew it: it flourished.

She got this honestly; her mother, my immigrant Polish grandmother, was a gardener. I don't know if it was by necessity or by choice, but I clearly remember my grandmother's yard-- there was none. It was all gardens. She had narrow brick paths that wove through roses and herbs; she had concord grapes on an arbor in front of a small chicken coop. (I was afraid of those nasty fowls- they sensed it and chased me mercilessly until I found protection behind my daddy's legs while my mom and her mom talked gardening.)

My grandma had vegetables galore and enough perennials (at the time I didn't know that's what they are called) so that in the warm months, there was always something blooming. She saved seeds from zinnias from one year to the next and each year they radiantly blossomed in colors scarlet, pumpkin, goldenrod, fuchsia. I never picked them- it never occurred to me to pick them because my grandmother scared me. She was loud and large (at least to a pre-schooler) and I didn't understand most of the broken English she spoke. But she's a story for another time.

So my mom inherited my grandmother's gardening inclinations and skills. In the spring and the fall each year, Mom would pick flowers that she had grown- lilacs, narcissus, daffodils in May, roses in June, black-eyed susans in September and chrysanthemums and asters as the nights got colder, wrap them first in sopping paper towels and then in scrunched-up aluminum foil, and I would tote them into my teacher, who always seemed to like them. (At least I thought she did-- it was always a “she” in elementary school back then.)

I appreciated my mom's yard, but I never got it. I never understood why someone would want to spent her free time bending and stretching for hours on end-- in ridiculous positions, I might add. At least my mom wore underwear and clamdiggers (the 50's, working class term for capris) while she was in those positions, unlike Mrs. Coombs across the street who, while wearing wide-legged shorts and no undergarments, would always weed the border of her hedge by skoodgelling down her front yard hill on her butt, legs bent at the knees, feet flat on the ground. You can imagine the available view to a little girl playing outside. One day I innocently asked my mom exactly what it was that I was seeing on Mrs. Coombs. I don’t remember the answer—I’m sure it was artfully dissembled—but after that, I was not allowed to be outside in the front yard when Mrs. Coombs was gardening.

But I didn’t understand Mom's liking a process that required her to dig in dirt that took a zillion hand washings and nail file forays to completely remove (in the 50's and early 60's garden gloves were clunky, canvas things that Mom detested because they didn't give her the precision she needed), to sweat like a racehorse (and sort of smell like one, too), and to swat constantly at honey bees who were competing for the flowers' attention. (Bees and I do not have a pleasant history.)

So Mom was a gardener; she gardened all the time. And she was good at it. She loved it. And, being the daughter of a gardener, she figured her daughter should likewise be a gardener. So when my family moved into our current home, she brought me plants- houseplants, shrubs, perennials, annuals, trees.

And I killed them all.

I could say it was because I had no luck with them, that I had a black thumb. But that wouldn’t be honest. I killed them because I had no interest in them—and with a more-than-full-time-job outside the home, and two little kids inside the home, and a husband who spent all his free time rehabilitating that home, the little free time I had I certainly didn’t want to spend dealing with them.

And that’s the way it was until 2004. In 2003 I had to retire- I was in a really bad place physically, mentally, emotionally, for a very long time. And so one day, some former teaching colleagues, one of whom I’d stayed in touch with over the years, asked me if I wanted to become the fourth member of their “Wednesday Hens” junkets to the local farmers’ market.

Listlessly I agreed, and thankfully they continued to allow my broken self to meet them for a day out every week from that point on. What I hadn’t clearly understood when they invited me to go with them that first time was that in addition to the farmers’ market in the morning, and the mandatory latte and muffin at the adjacent coffee shop, for 6 months of the year, from April to October, the rest of the day out was spent with plants—nurseries, greenhouses, Amish homes. Perennials, annuals, shrubs, trees. My friends, my rescuers, were gardeners!!

So I faced a dilemma. Did I stop going with them—my saviors (I have on more than one occasion said of them that they saved my life- if not physically, at least emotionally), or did I continue to tag along and, out of self-preservation, somehow try to develop an interest in what they enjoyed?

I chose the latter because while my husband and I have spent the last 30 years restoring / rehabilitating a farmhouse that was built about 1840, until 2004 our efforts had primarily been inside the structure. Oh, we had done some landscaping on the north side of our home, with a small perennial garden in 2001 (that’s when I actually learned what the word perennial meant) and a smaller herb garden in 2002. And we had planted some shrubs around the foundation of the house when we moved in, but that was it.

The rest of the place, and we have about 3 acres that my husband mows and takes care of on a 10 acre plot, looked unkempt, especially the sharply slanting border on one side of our long drive, which, because it was so steep, was mowed and weed-whacked less often than the rest of the lawn. I always used to hate that hill. It looked so…. ratty is the most politically correct word I can come up with.

So my transformation to someone who gardens began because of that hill early in the summer of 2005 when my friends took me to a private nursery. The owner of the business delights in cultivating, separating, and selling perennials, most of them grown on a steep incline behind her home. She has created small paths on the slope so that she can access the flowers and shrubs for weeding and pruning. I looked at her garden; I thought of my hill…

And the rest is history.

I came home and the next day I began to transfigure the hill--- creating “goat paths” to enable plantings, adding small rocks to create interest, determining locations to take advantage of sun. I detested every minute of this work, but I did it, remembering how beautiful the slope was at the home of the professional gardener. In late summer that year, when my friends routinely separate their perennials, I planted anything they gave me, even if I questioned its health.

My husband even asked, “Why are your friends giving you dead plants?” Since I couldn’t answer his question- I didn’t really know the answer- I simply glared and continued planting their offerings. (Subsequently, I learned that in early September as the growing season is coming to an end, many plants appear dead, but they’re really not.)

So now- almost 6 years after I became one of the "Wednesday Hens,” I have lots of gardens. I still hate everything about the process of gardening, but at least for now, the product is worth it because the care paid to the exterior of our home now matches the attention given to its interior.

I separate plants and give them to friends, but I don’t give any plants to my daughter unless I figure out a way to make sure they are cared for, because she, at least with respect to gardening, is like her mother and not her nana, a fact that I understand and appreciate.

Every spring, summer, and fall, I dig, I sweat, I ache… wearing appropriate clothing and undergarments, I might add, and I detest every minute spent outside in the dirt under the sun with the bees. Sometimes when I’m kneeling on throbbing knees with muscle spasms seizing my back, I sit up on my haunches, massaging my waist to relieve the pain, swatting at the divebombing infidels, and I look up to the heavens, saying “See, Mom? Do you see what I’m doing?”

I know she’s chuckling, poking my dad with a “See, Charlie? See, Charlie? I told you she was a gardener at heart.” My dad merely shakes his head.

So, for what it’s worth, my mom’s wrong and my dad’s right this time… I recognize that I’m good enough at the process of gardening, but I know that I’ll never be a gardener.