My mother's garden is nearing its half century. She has been tending it for most of those years. I remember when we moved into the house how large and exotic the yard seemed. Someone, probably the original owners, had carefully planned the two large patios, and laid out the paths from the side yard to the back. They had also planted things oddly out of place in this western landscape--a huge evergreen magnolia tree, a lilac bush, camellias, an apple tree, and a concord grape on a metal arbor. Also, a weeping cherry, an elm, and a mimosa or silk tree. Only the magnolia and the silk tree remain.
It all had a rather southern feel to me. I think less because I knew what a southern garden looked like than because of the paper mural that covered a wall of the living room of the house. My mother loved that wall paper. But then, she is a southern girl at heart. The mural was a source of embarrassment and even shame for me although I liked having a picture of a vast garden on our wall. However, the grey-green groves of rhododendron and palmettos and weeping willow trees by a meandering river couldn't make up for the looming white mansion with its columned portico. It probably wasn't Tara itself. But it might as well have been. A wall paper plantation was a suspicious oddity in this suburb of middle class "ranches" and fifties-style tract homes in the post civil rights era.
The plantation is still on the wall but the garden has changed dramatically. It no longer looks southern at all. The trees and shrubbery are not contained in their plots and have lost the shape they were put there to display. It's as if they have outgrown their gardener, found their own character and defied the design they had no part in planning.
Mother's roses are old, the canes gray. Her Victorian "knot" garden of clipped herbs now is more of a labyrinth, with bare spots in the hedges. My father's lawn is weary. He tells me he's through with trying to keep it green and wants to cover it with redwood bark. And the silk tree is dying.
It used to shade half the garden with its far reaching limbs of feathery green. Like great green wings, its boughs seemed to float above the patio, quelling the dry heat and bringing a deep and pleasant shade.
I stood under it today and could see mostly sky through its remaining branches, gradually lopped off as the rot claimed them. My mother said the tree man told her it had maybe a few more years before it would have to be taken out. She talked about planting a new tree near the old one, to start it before the silk tree died. But they haven't done that yet. And I am not sure they will.
Posted by briggs at May 9, 2004 8:29 PM