Gardening Thoughts on Mother's Day

There is something to be said for celebrating Mother’s Day in the most beautiful month of the year, amidst all the spring flowers. Wikipedia has a remarkable chart listing the timing of Mother’s Day in many countries around the world, and I noticed the majority of them do fall in May. 

My darling Mother showered me with unconditional love and her many talents included watercolor, design, dressmaking and cooking, but I attribute my love of gardening to my Gardening Grandmother. Cozily seated on the sofa with the snow piled up outside Grandmother would let me choose dozens of vegetable and flower seeds from the glossy catalogs to order for the garden. When springtime rolled around, we would plant an organic garden, turning under cover crops and organic mulch, lining out seeds of leaf lettuce, hilling up the cukes, ladling out manure tea. 

Grandmother had a garden that puzzled me, with old fashioned flowers and new hybrid vegetables all thriving together under fruit trees. It was much later that I learned hers was a “cottage garden”. The branches of her plum trees were so weighted down with fruit that 2 x 4s were needed to prop them up and prevent them from breaking. I NEVER remember being asked to weed, but inhabited a privileged sphere and was allowed to pick tiny cucumbers at 3-inches, rub off their prickles and munch them up in the garden still warm from the sun, or to pop the sensitive seed pods of Balsam or Touch Me Nots at will. 

In June, we would go to the annual Community Rose Show just before closing on the last day, and Grandmother would gather up the discarded roses to take home. These were carefully rooted under quart Mason jars, and in later years people would stop their cars to get out and marvel at the display of roses planted the length of the driveway.  She had green fingers and I absorbed the best gardening practices unconsciously.  

I still have a great treasure: Grandmother’s favorite trowel and I use it only occasionally. I have her seed box and I still grow descendents of the balsam and feverfew that used to grow in her garden. I’m a mom and when my sons were small we gardened together too.  One has turned out to love gardening, but the jury’s still out on the other one. I have high hopes of hitting two for two.