I think I may have posted this in 2005. I spent the morning in the garden, and the forget-me-nots she gave me and the irises I split to give her some are all in bloom. It made me think of this, and of how much I miss her, even though we never understood each other very well.
My mother hated gardening.
For one thing, she didn’t like to be hot, and the time when gardens in Delaware need the most attention is in July and August, when the temperatures run around 90 and the humidity around 100. Living is sweating. You can go out in the early morning or late evening, but even then it’s hard to tolerate.
She was afraid of insects. All it took was uncovering one big spider and she ran for the house. She loathed Japanese beetles, passed on to me her terrible fear of praying mantises, and mosquitoes left her and me with walnut-sized welts. Spiders live in mulch; Japanese beetles live on roses and azaleas, and mosquitoes are everywhere.
She said she loved flowers. But she didn’t want to put any time into them. She would buy some ‘Magic Garden’ promotion from some ad in the paper, roll out the green felt, water it once, and complain when the gaily-colored flower bed in the ad didn’t sprout by the next week. Once we saw some beautiful shrubs, American beautyberry and a miniature holly. She went to the nursery and bought some that same week. The nursery came and planted them. They left instructions, and I gave her an earnest lecture (one of many over many years) about watering. They were all dead in six months flat. "But I watered them!", she protested. There was no use in arguing. Standing there with the hose for fifteen minutes twice in six months felt like six months’ straight work to her.
We found some tough perennials for her that came up without much care: daylilies, rudbeckia, some liatris, some big tough irises. Three different times she paid landscapers a lot of money to come in, re-dig the beds, re-lay the paths. Every time forget-me-nots and poppies and weeds, mostly weeds, ate them all.
Even in the house, on the rare occasions she cut some flowers and brought them in, she let them sit until the flowers dropped their petals and the water in the vase grew algae. "Nice flowers, Mommy," I’d say, and she’d say "Oh, aren’t they pretty...oh," finally seeing them for the first time in days.
For most of her married life, she lived in a brick twin. There was a massive forsythia bush at one corner of the porch, a tiny flower bed fronted by a lawn of mostly crabgrass, southern ivy, and dandelions (our neighbor was devoted to Scott’s lawn products and hated us). While I was in high school I kept the flower bed up, little marigolds and petunias and things. When I went away to college, she planted azaleas in the bed and around the side of the house. The side of the house faced due north and got no sun. They died and sat there, skeletons, for a year or two, until our neighbor pulled them out. The ones out front lived, but in tangled masses of weeds. Point them out and she’d say "Oh, I know. I’ve got to get in there and weed." She never did. Once in a while our neighbor would whack the weeds in self-defense.
When she moved to the suburbs, there were beautiful specimen miniature evergreens, an oak tree, and some nice azaleas and holly planted out front. My husband and I spent two weekends building her a rock garden around the miniature evergreens. We mulched, we built a retaining wall, and it looked lovely, but in the spring she frowned down at it and said "There are no flowers". So we brought her splits of our own Siberian irises, brought her daffodils and tulips, veronica and candytuft, and ten packets of annual seeds.
She said she’d plant it herself, and we let her. The irises went in six inches from a downspout. The daffodils and tulips, candytuft and veronica and annuals went in under the porch awning, arid as the Sahara. "I thought you were bringing me things that would bloom," she said. I opened my mouth, and shut it. The next spring we went home, dug out some more irises and candytuft and veronica, and this time we planted them ourselves, in frilly little clumps in the rock garden, where they took and flourished.
So what about my mother? A woman who claimed she loved flowers and genuinely wanted a garden, but wouldn’t do one thing to keep it up. The flowers under her nose could drop their petals, turn into stalks in algae soup, and she never even noticed it. What we put in for her went knee deep in weeds year after year unless we took care of it. But did she want us to be there, keeping it up? Not really. It irritated her to have us around weeding and watering.
I garden. When I was a teenager, I grew flowers in the front beds and tomatoes out back. As soon as I had an apartment porch it was covered with pots of New Guinea impatiens and geraniums and patio tomatoes. Now I have fifty or so old garden roses, perennials, vegetables, a cutting garden, and shrubs – more than we can take care of, really. But what can you do? It’s a garden. You have to have a garden.
In 2004 my garden was particularly fine. I kept telling her that she should come and see the roses, see the beautiful zinnias, and she said she would, but she always had something else that she wanted to do instead, something more important. And then she was too sick to come. She died in November.
I don’t really know what the narrative is here. Cross purposes? I know that as long as she lived and as often as she wanted me to, I put in her gardens and watched her let them die, and I still don’t know why. I tell myself that there are thousands and thousands of unanswered questions between mothers and daughters, and this isn’t really that important. But I wonder.