True Dirt

in my mother's garden

Sunday I loaded up my flat of poppies (papaver hybrids), pentstemon, and snapdragon and drove to my parents' place about an hour away. It was a startlingly bright morning with no storm clouds in sight. There has been so much rain, so many storms these last four weeks that a moment of sun caused me to squint deeply as if I had emerged from long habitation in a cave. I counted on the blue skies to give me a few hours to get all the plants in the ground, and then for predictions of a new storm today to provide the post-interrment watering.

I had some trepidation on the drive over. My mother, who has just turned 80, and is rather frail, recently took a fall in which she fractured her pelvis. Painful, and it required her to use a walker, but it wasn't a break requiring surgery. I've been fretting about the health of my elderly parents and their need for some help around the house. In fact, they are tenacious and stubborn and don't want my help, or anyone else's. My mother loves company, eating, and playing dominoes. My father, a crank by nature (not age), is sometimes garrulous when he is pitching some new philosophy or crank idea, but often prefers to remain out of sight when there are visitors.

I was hoping that the planting project would give me something positive to focus on, and limit the visit to the bit of gardening and maybe a game of dominoes. When I arrived, my mother, looking startlingly thin, declared she was "off the walker" and to prove it, lurched determindly about the kitchen in her robe. I asked her if she would like to go out to lunch at Mike's, a little cafe we frequent nearby in the sleepy business district of this aging, and weirdly metamorphosing suburb (more about that later). She said no. I think. Her hearing is quite impaired these days, as is her speech, and I really wasn't sure if she knew what I had asked, or was able to articulate what she wanted. A kind of metaphor for our relationship.

I gathered up my tools--my gloves, Felcos, and a narrow trowel--and went out front to the raised planters where I intended to deposit my spring bloomers. Now this front garden is a strange affair, evoking highly structured 1960s design and yet coming off as a sort of kitchen garden with a central diamond-shaped planter surrounded by triangular planters, separated by cement-pebble paths and surrounded by a low split-rail fence. It fronts the ranch house facade, and is adjacent to a pitched-roof carport--the only one on a street of ranch/bungalows fronted by enclosed two-car garages.

This is all beside the point to my mother. She simply filled in the weird architectural spaces with the most traditional of garden mainstays--hybrid tea roses along the fence, and a series of spring blooming bulbs in the planters: tulips, Dutch iris, poppies in the center planter, and bearded iris, penstemon and dahlias in the triangular ones. Then my father filled in the blanks around the rail fence with man-plants: hedge juniper, hedge privet, and the indestructible glossy-leaved star jasmine.

I proceed to the planters and realize I have to pull out a pile of weeds before I can plant. That takes a while. The my mother yells out the open window (her bedroom overlooks the front garden) to hurry up and get the plants in because she wants to go to Mike's. Who knew. I plop the plastic pots on the ground where I want them to go and stab the wet dirt, thinking it should be softer than it is. Oh well. I get the poppies in, then the pentstemon, and lastly the Antirrhinum "double apricot azalea" purported to have a scent (unlike any other snapdragon I've met).

My mother appears at the door all dressed and raring to go. It occurs to me that she has gotten a hankering for a hamburger and fries, foods she is not supposed to eat but has a passion for. Then my father appears in the front where I am packing up my garden tools, and says "what's happened to the Eureops!" He is apparently referring to the massive, rather gouche shrub covered with primary yellow daisy flowers that has fallen over with the weight of rain and it's own prolificness. I had no idea it was a Eureops or that my father knew Latin plant names.

I ponder the fact that there are still surprises to be experienced with these two ancient beings I am the product of, as my mother and I lunch on tuna melt (me) and hamburger with lots of mayo (her), and she sips her (forbidden) glass of chardonnay. Life is sweet.

Posted by briggs at March 27, 2006 5:55 PM