Remembering Gardens

Now as spring slowly, very slowly, arrives here in the southern Rockies with what may be the last snowfall of the season just a week behind us, I’m reminded of all the spring gardens I’ve enjoyed, beginning with Easter in Kentucky.

My mother was a passionate gardener; I often felt her happiest times were when she was taking care of her big perennial garden, always with help, but reserving a lot of the weeding for herself. Once she offered to pay me a penny for each ant I picked off her mob of blooming white peonies; I was glad to have a chance to make a little money, although the sticky ouze that attracted the ants was hard to get off my fingers.

On Easter morning, she would leave a basket of child-sized gardening tools and seed packets outside my bedroom door; what a treat that was! I don’t remember whether I ever actually planted the seeds but the possibility of actually growing flowers delighted me.

As a young adult I lived in cities with access only to public parks. One winter, my new husband managed to have a window-sized greenhouse made for me; it was a most delightful surprise in the middle of Boston’s harsh grey winter.

My first real garden was in the foundations of a collapsed barn in upstate New York, the ground generously manured by generations of milk cows. Again, my mother helped to find and order the plants appropriate to that climate, and although I was too harried with work and children to spend much time there. I recognized the beauty of what she had created.

My next garden was a pathetic attempt in the poor dirt outside the suburban house where I found myself after moving impulsively to Louisville but again, Mother did all she could to make that unpromising bit of soil bloom.

After that various gardens that came with various old houses here in Santa Fe reflected the tastes and expertise of previous owners rather than mine. The pot garden outside my studio in the mountains manages to flourish in the midst of drought with plants my mother never knew, mainly succulents and cacti, slow growing and enduring. But every spring when I buy some annuals—petunias, daisies, sunflowers—at our Farmers’ Market and transplant into my pots, I think how astonished she would be that even here in the drought-stricken Southwest, some flowers manage to thrive.

In My Family My Garden gardening Mary Caperton Bingham