Playing Round the Garden Trees

My mother has lived in her house since 1972. I remember when we moved in: I had just finished sixth grade, the grass hadn’t been cut in years and there was a row of hemlocks along the sidewalk that completely blocked the house from the street. But there was architecture to the yard - low walls of river stone bounding untended flower beds, lovely pink dogwoods that bowed down to the ground, a cement fountain near a decrepit fish pond.

Over the years, my mother has tended every square inch of the property. There are curving pathways edged with hosta, flowering shrubs, perennials galore. A grape arbor abuts the garage, a row of raspberries borders the vegetable garden, there are blueberry and currant bushes. She’s composted forever: kitchen scraps go to one pile, and fallen leaves to the “rhino pit”. The hemlocks are long gone and the street side of the house is visible, but from the side porch, you can see no other houses.

When W. and I bought our house three and a half years ago, we started to address our own garden. We took out a wild rose that had smothered two big azaleas. We moved shrubs that were too close together, and others that were just in the wrong places. I’ve ripped out countless wild daylilies while reclaiming a hillside flower bed. And nearly every time I’ve gone to visit my mother in the spring or summer or early fall, I’ve returned home with a plant or two, or a carload.

This past weekend, I spent some time at her house. Much of the time I was tending to her, and monitoring my daughter, but for an hour on Friday, while the hospice aide was watching my sleeping mother, I puttered around out in her yard. I dug up a bit of this, a little of that, and took it all home to plant on Sunday.

I have a tiny piece of a fancy blue hosta, a couple of volunteer boxwoods, and some sweet woodruff. There are coral bells and creeping sedum and candytuft and bleeding hearts that originated at my grandmother’s house. I found a little doublefile viburnum, maybe three feet tall, under my mother’s huge one. A divine and feisty woman from across the street had once passed on some of her peonies and irises; I took a little of each. I dug up a mess of variegated solomon’s seal – a plant that someone else had given her. Along her front walk, out of place and threatening a yew, was a volunteer evergreen that I can’t identify – but I potted it up anyway.

It so pleases me that I have these pass-along plants. It connects me and my land back to my mother and hers, and to my grandparents too. It connects me to my mother’s friends and neighbors, and to all the other people to whom she’s given bits of plants. And when I walk around my house and through my yard at the end of the day, it feels like home.