by Barbara Nevins Taylor

Who knows if the love of gardening is genetic? Does the feel for beautiful flowers and plants pass from one generation to the next? I do know that even on a rainy, cool May day when my garden continues to shrug off winter and breathe itself back to life, I smile and give thanks to my mother and grandmother for inspiring me to take pleasure in flowers and plants.

Our grandma, crippled with arthritis for as long as I knew her, gardened inside. Mom tended her beautiful backyard garden just a few houses away in Laurelton, Queens.

Grandma filled her sunporch window sills with snake plants, aloe and cacti.  Like pets, they rubbed up against her as she worked her ancient Singer treadle sewing machine. She watered and fussed with the greenery and shrugged off any suggestion from her grown children that maybe she had too many “ugly” plants.  

 

Mom’s garden was something else. In the summer when we opened the kitchen windows and hung wash on the line, the fresh scent of flowers and trees filled our small kitchen

A splashy red rambling rose bush sprawled crazily across the back fence. Tiger lilies bloomed underneath and alongside the big rambler, and a sickle pear tree with sweet fruit bloomed in the corner.

Whenever my sister Hope and I drove past the house we left as young adults, we shook our heads, amazed that on this postage stamp-sized property our mom created a garden filled with beauty.

My memory sees a garden-lover’s plan. It wasn’t just a jumble of plants, but an understanding of order with a bit of chaos stirred in. A pussy willow lolled along a side fence. Then came perfumed tea roses with flame-like petals in a neat row of bushes. A rose with soft pink petals blossomed beside yellow roses and another with lavender blooms and yet another soft red. A giant peony exploded into a blur of pink under a pear tree that almost leaned into our house. 

A gnarly apple tree grew on the other side of the patch of grass we called a lawn. It shaded purple hydrangeas that stretched out along a narrow bed under its branches. A patch of cement led to our junk-filled garage and on the other side, along a fence, mom planted purple and white irises, lilies of the valley and a small tree she called an orange blossom.

She always did most of the gardening herself. She would say, “My husband says, ‘I garden to the best of my wife’s ability.'” Years after they divorced, she repeated his self-indictment and his praise for her talent. She loved that garden and it showed.

Things changed for her and us. She moved from Laurelton, realized different dreams and accomplished different things. But almost until her last days at 95, like her mother she found places for small green plants indoors and kept alive her passion and interest in growing something green and beautiful.

She also, somehow, infused me with the passion. And for that and many other things, I’m grateful.