My mother's garden

On Mother's Day, when I was around 29 years old, I gave my mother a little children's book I'd written about working in the garden with her. I think she liked it. (Sorry, this is a long post...I got carried away.)

Chaos reigned in our home when I was growing up. Hampers overflowed, people were stressed (or, alternately, unnaturally relaxed), relationships were complicated. My mom was, let us say, adrift. She tried to find purpose and security in a home, in a relationship that was irretrievably flawed and insecure. As a parent, let us also say she was oblivious – to her children’s needs, to their gifts, to the affect her life’s craziness was having on us. All of that said, there was one place where all the turbulence subsided: our backyard.

My mom, as a minister’s wife, had never had her own home. She had lived in a series of parsonages – and just when she’d get settled, the bishop would tell them it was time again to move. My dad left the ministry not long after our eventful trip to the Holy Land, when I was about three years old. They bought a house for the first time in their nearly twenty years of marriage.

For Mom, it wasn’t so much the house itself as having a yard, a place to grow and nurture plants, that was exciting. Mother was not a great housekeeper or cook. Her mother had died when she was born, and her dad had raised her. He didn’t really help to foster her domestic skills, but he was a gifted gardener. My grandfather was not the best parent (to put it mildly). But it seems that working together in the garden was a good experience for her, as it was later for me.

Mother loved fuchsias, geraniums, and anything in a hanging basket. She was inspired by great hanging displays and beauty in various gardens – the Tea Garden at Golden Gate Park, the botanical gardens near Monterey and Fort Bragg. In the yard behind our little home, Mom was relaxed and grounded. She taught me at an early age the difference between the weeds and the plants, helping me memorize the names of each. We weeded together for hours - not talking, just working. Mom had a full-time job outside the home, so she was limited to weekends and evenings for this hobby – but she rarely missed an opportunity. She’d come home from work, make dinner, feed us; we’d wash the dishes, then head outside to the backyard.

Sometimes my dad would get it into his head to join in, but his garden projects never really panned out. One spring he dug up the whole side of the house to plant a vegetable garden. Within a month it was filled with weeds – and I’m not sure if we picked a single pea, bean, or tomato.

Gardening was different for my mom. It was a stabilizing force, a refuge. On hikes, she knew all the wildflowers and trees. In our yard, she knew the names of these, as well as the birds, the bugs, and their habits.

One project my mom and dad did complete together in the yard was the “lath house.” They built a raised bed garden in one corner of the yard and then added a structure – two walls and a roof made of lath. It was light and airy. The lath provided shade and a place for creeping vines to anchor and grow. It must have been something they found in Sunset Magazine. Anyway, my mom loved it as a place for her fuchsias and tuberous begonias. A few of the sunnier boxes held colorful geraniums. The shadier corners grew lush clumps of baby’s tears.

I learned how to dig peat moss into the hard, clay-filled soil, how to tell when things needed watering, and how to water them without doing damage. Sometimes, while my mother worked on an area, I would explore and play in the “woods.” One side of the yard had tall evergreens against the fence, beside them ran a little path of gardening stones, then some decorative bushes (mostly junipers) and large-leaved ivy. In the far corner beneath the tallest tree, was a wild, open area under the big tree’s canopy. I loved to play there and explore. When I heard stories of fairies or elves, I was certain that if they existed anywhere, they would exist in this corner of my backyard.

But there was one backyard gardening duty that I found difficult to tolerate. My mom and I would water the yard in the evening after we had weeded. Then we’d go inside for an hour of TV until the sun went down. After dark, my mom would grab a flashlight and a coffee can for each of us. Then we went out back, got down on our hands and knees, and searched (with flashlights) for snails and slugs. Ugh. There were hundreds.

Our watering seemed to force them out of hiding and to stimulate their urge to visit the leaves of Mom’s flowers. We could follow their shiny iridescent trails of slime to find their location. As I write, I can still smell the moist peat moss and geraniums, and I can feel the slight “pop” of suction as I pull each snail from its perch on a leaf. I can hear the “plunk” of dropping it in the coffee can (of course, as the can filled with snails, there was more of a thud than a plunk). One trick was opening and closing the lid quickly and as slightly as you could. The snails tended to crawl up and try to climb out each time the lid was opened. If you didn’t do it just right, things would squish. Just let your imagination fill in the blank. When I found a big slug, I often called my mom over to get it. She wore gloves and I didn’t.

On our flashlight expeditions, Mom would call me over when she came across “Mr. Toad” the big grandpa of all toads who left an impression where he slept. Neighborhood cats liked to follow us around the yard as we worked and sometimes scared us when their glowing eyes appeared within a bush.

But it must have been the same year that I gave up playing with the neighbor boys that I gave up the snail hunt. I remember going to bed and imagining the snails, now out in our garbage, sealed in their coffee-can world. I knew they were gasping for breath and would die slowly. I knew this because I had checked them in the morning and many were still alive, but some had expired. My mother initially tried to rid us of snails using poison pellets. It hadn’t worked. Then she tried squishing them with her shoe. That was just gross and left a big, messy residue. Hence, the coffee can solution. It was that or no flowers – and Mom couldn’t give up her flowers.

Working in the backyard with my mother is one of my favorite memories. It was her form of therapy, and years later, it would work for me, too. I am still an outstanding weeder and nothing can bring me back to my Self more quickly than digging in the dirt. I don’t miss the snails or slugs…and I’ll never be a fan of escargot. But the smell of moist earth after the rain still takes me back to a very special place – to working in the backyard with my mother.