John Henry's garden reminds me of how I started gardening. There are early stories of my cultivating a relationship with a neighbor across the street whose big blue pansy border was my first flower passion. That was at the age of 3. A couple of years later we moved to a house that had an undeveloped backyard and my mother embarked on her now 50-year (and more) gardening habit. There is a fading Kodachrome of her kneeling at the foot of her first rose bush. She's in pedal-pushers and sneakers. The rose--an American Hybrid Tea--sports a single red bloom. When I brought home a pumpkin seed planted in a sawed off milk carton from school she carved out a corner of the yard and planted it, along with some zinnias, snapdragons, and sweet peas for me to water and tend. I didn't have another garden of my own for many decades but I did develop an interest in wildflowers and roamed much of California and the West in search of wild gardens to photograph. Now, finally, I have a garden of my own. And most Sunday mornings between 10am and noon I have a coffee cup in one hand and the phone in the other, talking to my mother. About our gardens, of course.
Posted by briggs at May 16, 2003 3:01 PM