My mother was a gardener! Despite frail health, she was one of those people who grew plants and flowers as a matter of course.
To these “born gardeners,” it is the natural way of living.
Remembering her flowers, there comes the realization of the difficulties that beset her as the wife of a Methodist minister.
White Lily
There was the “white lily” that was kept in a pot because March (moving time) was no time for digging a lily bulb from the ground.
That white lily (Madonna) was a tradition of my childhood; something was always happening to it, and it was always a cause of fuss and worry.
Only after retirement brought permanence did the bulb, planted at last in the ground, bloomed and multiply.
Mom’s Favorite Annuals
Whenever we moved to a new parsonage, the first things we looked for were hardy shrubs and roses — which were all too few. So we grew annuals.
Among my mother’s favorites were four o’clock, dianthus pinks, phlox drummondi, and candytuft.
The last three were good for cutting because she always took a bouquet to some sick person. Often, there was a fern bed on the north side of the house, and here also grew pansies and “little double daisies.”
Then there were the wildflowers she knew and loved, especially white primroses, prairie phlox, and “skyrockets” (Liatris).
The Talk of the Town
My mother’s house plants were the talk of the town — geraniums (how they bloomed), begonias, heliotrope, sultanas, primroses, cyclamen, marguerites, and tea roses.
At the moving time, these plants were wrapped in newspapers, packed in tubs, and placed in the chartered car carrying the preacher’s belongings to the next home. Sometimes the freight car was side-tracked and left for days before it moved on.
At one such time, a terrible calamity struck. A prowler entered the car and disturbed the goods. Nothing was missing, but he carelessly removed the protection from the plants, and they were frozen!
Then retirement brought a home of our own at last. Finally, we could plant and plant — and we did.
Plant Boxes
Now came the boxes of plants from the West Virginia hills that mother had loved as a child. Although I had never seen those woods and hills, they became familiar through her telling of them and through the moss-packed boxes that came by mail from the old home.
“I went up to the old Jarrett place yesterday,” Aunt Martha would write, “and I’m sending you some plants from the woods.”
Those plants were the essence of memory to my mother and to me, were treasures from another world.
There were the mountain tea berries with their shining spicy leaves and bright berries. How mother loved to tell about brushing away the Autumn leaves to find those red berries. Of course, they needed acid soil, but we did not know that then.
Holly And Sweet Gum Tree
Two plants that my mother especially coveted were holly and a sweet gum tree. Both survived in Kansas for several years, finally succumbing to drought, but not before I knew by heart the evergreen beauty of the holly bush and the individual grace of the sweet gum leaf.
And now her granddaughter writes that she is going to the woods to get holly and sweet gum to plant on their new little home in suburban Washington.
Virginia Bluebells
But dearest of all to my mother’s heart and an abiding source of pleasure was the Virginia blue-bells — “just like the ones I used to gather.”
These delicate beauties, with their pink buds and their swinging bells of heavenly blue, established and multiplied themselves and persisted through my mother’s lifetime, a constant link between the new and the old home.
The bluebells and the “rose” grow in my garden today; when they bloom, they are my mother’s flowers to me.
44659 by Myrnice C. Morgan