My Mother, the Gardener

Some in my family can make plants flourish, but the sure way to kill one is to put it in my care.

My mother went through stages of gardening.

She became fascinated with poppies after talking with her uncles who fought in WWI.

In the spring, between Belgium trenches where the fields of poppies grew, seeds survived in torn up ground. When the weather warmed, seeds sprouted.

The poem “In Flanders Fields” was written in 1915 by a Canadian doctor, John McCrae, and published that year.

It was written after the funeral of a friend who died in the “Second Battle of Ypres.”

McCrae wrote, “In Flanders Fields, the poppies blow, Between the crosses, row on row.”

That memorable image steered my mother to plant poppies as a tribute to her uncles.

Poppies were the first flowers I remember around our home.

After a span of time, she transferred her love of poppies into a fascination with roses.

She took cuttings from a friend’s rose bushes and stuck the cuttings into a potato. The cuttings rooted, and she earned a backyard of roses.

Her grandfather came to Georgia from Barnes Station, South Carolina. Family visitors later brought suckers from the family fig bush, and descendants of that fig bush have been generously distributed.

That event motivated her to collect plants from as many ancestors’ homes as she could find.

One spring I helped her pull forsythia plants out of the ground and move them to her mother’s front yard. Later we dug out sweet shrub and found a happy place for it to thrive.

She dug bulbs of jonquils and divided the bulbs, divided them again. Her favorite was “butter and eggs.”

She later developed a love for azaleas, and I wonder what she would think of the ever blooming types with flowers all year.

I have a long love of sassafras but have never successfully rooted a cutting in any way. I’ve tried air layering without results.

They do produce tiny flowers and seeds, but I’ve never seen them.

As I write this, peonies are abloom in the Midwest. They celebrate Memorial Day with their color and beauty.

They are common in rows and singularly in cemeteries here, but I have never seen them in Georgia.

I don’t know that my mother ever saw a peony. If so, we would have had them in scores.

joenphillips@yahoo.com