Of Gardens and Grandmas

I have a perennial flower garden.  I call it my Grandma garden.  I love the idea of passing on the love of country flowers to another generation. It is a love that includes memorial days at my grandmother's house when we would go about the yard gathering iris and spirea, pussy willow, snowball, and forsythia to put on graves. It includes my memories of an elderly neighbor's rose garden, and my mother teaching me how to make flower ladies from hollyhocks. I remember walking down the road to my friend's house in the spring time and smelling the lilac scent waft toward me from their border hedge of lilac bushes. I wanted to have lilac in my bridal bouquet, but that was not a practical desire, for their season is short. I love so many flowers. Perennial flowers bloom for only a few weeks a year, so I have collected a variety of types so that my front garden blooms all spring and summer. It is a random and haphazard collection of plants that I have started from bulbs and roots and nursery plants. Some plants thrive, and some plants fade away, so always the garden is changing. Last year I cleaned out some of the aggressive plants that had taken over too much space and moved them to some spots along the mow strip, where nothing else seems to survive, Then I started some new plants that I have been wanting to add to the graden. I moved everything around and dug up the root system of a reed that grows near us at the pond. It had invaded my garden and a huge web of roots up to a centimeter in diameter had to be dug out from under the other plants. They were about 6 to 8 inches below the surface--a seriously hardy strain of weed. I like to say that Cinton is the weed capital of the world, because we have some seriously hardy strains here. I am currently doing some clean up work near the edge of the garden, where I didn't quite finish my work last summer, and there is grass and established weeds that need to be dug out from among the border flowers. The other day, as I was digging, a couple of families walked by. They stopped to look at the daffodils and hyacinth with their little children, pointing out the "pretty flowers." One woman commented that "That looks like a lot of work." "It is." was my reply. Not as many people seem to grow these types of gardens today. Annuals are easier, and also beautiful. But these old flowers remind me of my childhood and my grandparents, and that makes me feel happy.