I don't think I can compete with my parents being Jackie and Jack Kennedy, but I have good memories, but no comparison to that.

Several years back, a very elegant older woman came to my door. She explained the had been born into our home in 1940, and she asked sheepishly if she might take a tour. I was delighted to show her around.

When we went out back, she let out a gasp when she saw the huge climbing Cecile Brunner she remembered from her childhood: "It's still here", she exclaimed with great emotion. For just a moment I feared her knees might buckle, she was so overwhelmed.

It was a very special moment for me too. One I'll never forget.

Bill

I never had much that I would say were outstanding successes in the past, tons of screwups, beautiful nasturtiums until the aphids got them all, sprayed this nasty smelling powder on them to no avail, African daisies were pretty, Betty Prior, Queen Elizabeth did well for some years, and some pretty dahlias but don't want to dig them out in the fall.

I think my most exciting memory is what could have been. I bought some Viola Chantreyland I think it was and also some johnny jump up plants and just stuck them in the border. The next year I got this larger pansy-like bloom that was pale yellow in the center with a border of light true blue. I didn't know about saving seeds but felt I had something special there, told a co-worker about it; he just shrugged lol.

Both my grandmas I used to follow to the garden. One grew lots of flowers and vegetables. I still have the knife, or one exactly like it, she used to dig potatoes for our supper one night. She also grew those little yellow husk tomatoes and made the most wonderful preserves out of them, also was enchanted by sweet peas and picked black raspberries (my fav) from her patch as a kid.

My maternal grandmother, one day she's babysitting me, so she decides to plant some seeds. She pulled out some envelopes of seeds she had saved from the previous year, we went out, no digging or weeding, and she just poked a hole and stuck them in the ground.

My dad grew some cool castor bean plants, we rented that place so the iris, lilacs, and a gorgeous rose I wish I could find out the name of were already growing there.

But there is a sadness about part of it. One day on an impulse, I went to the nursery and bought a flowering dogwood. It was balled and burlapped and so heavy I could hardly carry it to the back door and left it; they weren't home. The neighbors told my parents they thought I put it there. My father planted it, and I forgot it. Not too long after, in April of 1968 my mother died suddenly. A little later, I went to see my dad and felt so sad, I looked out the kitchen window and saw that beautiful little tree blooming. A couple of years ago I wondered if it was still living. I drove by our old house and it was, had grown tall and leggy and was more of a reddish pink than I had remembered, so maybe it wasn't the same one but was in the same spot. I snapped a photo of it and shared it with my sister. They cut down all my dad's trees, his sycamore, his ginko, he loved trees, but that one was spared.

It's nice that the memories and sometimes the actual plants live on after they are gone.

When I was a kid my great grandmother lived within a short walk of my grandparents. We would run from place to place, especially when my grandfather was over there visiting his mother. My great grandmother was a gardener, but of course this is nothing that I ever thought of as a kid.
Years pass.
Both great grandmother and my grandfather are gone. Now I am a gardener and I obtained some old fashioned petunia seeds. The scent blew me away - I was instantly transported back in time to my great grandmother's garden. I don't remember her growing these, but the scent reminds me of her garden so she must have had them everywhere.
On an interesting note - 2 years ago my cousin bought my great grandmother's place. It has gone through various owners over the years and most of the garden is gone, but there are irises by the thousands growing under a big huge magnolia tree. My great great grandparents actually built the home, and I bet that they are the ones that planted the magnolia.
Kind of gives me hope for the future. My plants may be enjoyed by other generations.

My parents lived here, in Texas, a few more years than me. We moved here from California, this was when I was an adult...when I first moved out here, I worked for my mother, helping her "in her yard" about an acre or more, where she grew all sorts of things..there were some roses, but they did poorly..neither one of us, was motivated to learn how to care for them. I later found out that she was trying to grow Brownell sub zero roses...in Texas? in this heat?

Gardening and plants arch from the past over the present and into the future. I don't know what will happen to all my plants when I'm dead, and I don't worry about it: even if it all goes to weeds and brush, perhaps other gardeners will come and take cuttings and dig up bits of iris root to take home and grow. We can't control what happens once we're gone, just try and leave something good for those who come after us.

My parents bought the lot where they built the house I grew up in because it had a huge live oak on it. Fifty years later the oak is probably past its prime but still pretty grand; and it has magnolias growing around it that I remember as young trees when I was a child, now husky adolescents forty years later. They're taking their time! Another big live oak in the back is still upholding the honor of oaks. Our property here hardly has one big handsome tree on it; all the trees were cut for firewood and left to resprout, a very common practice. So we have to be content with planting the trees that, with luck, will be huge for our great-grandchildren, or somebody else's descendents. My husband is in his seventies, and at first he didn't see the point in planting small trees that he would never see get big, but after six years here he's seeing visible growth even on seedling oaks and Atlas cedars, and is becoming enthusiastic. For my part I hope I'll still be planting trees when I'm eighty.

Melissa

My story is a simpleton comparatively but it comes from my gardener's journal a few years ago.

She was beautiful when she was young, the most beautiful woman I have ever seen. Her hair was raven colored, her cheek bones framed the most beautifully architectural face and her eyes were like chestnuts. In the picture I saw, her waist could not have been more than 18 inches cinched in a laced corset, no doubt, but she was young and though beautiful, the white blouse with its high collar and pearl buttons complimented the face already terse with tracking miles, but the long black taffeta-like skirt lent a beautifully elegant woman even more softness. Her fingers were long, as if manicured to give them a bony look so they accentuated the single gold ring with a lone diamond that adorned her left ring finger. The only other jewelry she wore was the single strand of pearls, a compliment to pearl-buttoned blouse. The picture in black and white was growing tired and becoming gray and yellow but it showed the true character of this beautiful woman, a young bride who had just finished breast-feeding her fifth child.

Many miles, many Sundays and many hardships from that day, this woman who cuddled and cured sick animals, made sure every homeless person who traveled the dirt road to her door was fed a decent meal, breast fed her babies, hand fed her animals, milked cows, plucked eggs, wrung the necks of the chickens she loved so that her family might eat, suffered a depression, buried a child in the lonely cold January wind of a Texas snow. She was a midwife to many, a respite for all that came her way. She could bait a fishing hook and catch a meal, scale the fish and fry them up, and serve with style on an Army Navy tablecloth, a gift from a loving nephew who served in the European theatre. The blue and white China gave credence to a blue plate dinner.

She watched the skies for clouds that might blow in and destroy the crops, the homes. She watched for homeless animals who needed food, and she fed them, petted them, named them and gave them a place to live away from harm, in the safety of her home or the now-abandoned horse barn. She lovingly fed and milked her cows, whose names were those of beloved family members. She shoveled manure to the plants she grew. Her gray washwater from the clothes she washed, starched and ironed was applied to the flower beds. The hulls from legumes she grew, the corn she shocked, all went to the large rows of flower beds of azaleas, spirea, daylilies, camellias, roses and all those who had no name or were passed along to her by her mother. The oldest of 14 children, and one of two female children, she knew her way around the kitchen, around the farm, around the neighborhood. She was the first to bring a meal when someone died, the last to leave the grieving family late at night.

She was my grandmother, the one who gave me a love for gardening. Regardless of how we tried, we could never match her in humanitarian efforts. It seemed to roll off her like the sweat off her brow when she was preparing meals, not only for her family, but all the hired help on the farm. Her afternoons were spent cleaning up the kitchen, picking fruit from the orchards, peeling, seeding, and planning the next days meal. Her evenings were spent reading the newspaper and the letters after the long day was done. Her fig preserves, her peach jelly, pepper jelly, apple and plum jelly lined the walls of an outdoor building with wall-to-wall and floor-to-ceiling shelving. Blueberries and blackberries that she picked, while fending off snakes for the tiny rabbits or small grandchildren, adorned biscuits or scones that she made from scratch for breakfast. She learned to make tomato gravy, white gravy and hoecakes from the days in Texas when money was scarcer than loved ones. But gardening was her passion and she was very good at growing beautiful things, making them green, making them bloom, making them large. Of all the items in her garden, she loved bridal wreath the most. As her body became more bent with arthritis and her ribs began to collapse onto her lungs, she had asthma so severe that she could hardly breathe but she managed her way to the kitchen each morning to prepare breakfast for many, for more years than I care to think of, long past her physical ability to do that what she loved doing.

She looked at catalogs and cut patterns from newspapers for the latest and most fashionable clothes so that her family members might dress with pride and glamour. She saved money to buy silk and lacy lingerie for herself and her daughters and granddaughters, something very few women could afford and certainly not in abundance. She washed and ironed handkerchiefs with little lace corners that she kept fresh and piled high for church and funeral attendance.

The treks to the fields to gather brush to make brooms always occurred on Sunday afternoon once the family members and minister had left. Cool afternoons in the fall were spent sitting outside, rifling through the brush to remove anything that might be caught on the wooden floors that she scrubbed with a mop made of rags which she had saved from her sewing that were not "fit for quilts." Ah, Winter. Winter is when she made the quilts. She hand-basted her quilts and later sewed them together after the batten had been added for substance. If there was time of Saturdays after preparing everyoneÂs clothing for church the following day, she took time to teach us to embroider, crochet, knit and do tatting. There was never a shortage of pillow cases that she had made from bleached cotton fabric onto which we could embroider designs and sew our finished tatting. To this day, I still have a pillow case of crisp white cotton which I trimmed in the only tatting that I had the patience to complete, with a compelling blue bird I embroidered with red roses in its beak. I never completed the leaves so the rose is just that a rose with no foliage, not unlike my garden in the heat of summer.

She taught me about cottonseed meal, guano, how to "drop" potatoes, sow peas, stake running beans, tried very hard to teach me about grafting plants, pick colors for a dress to suit my coloring and hair, how to clean china without eradicating the platinum band, how to clean crystal without pitting it, how to separate the clothes for laundry by color and fabric, how to love people who we find difficult to like, how to accept my children as individuals and to know they may not always walk with the right foot first but I must love and nurture them as best I can for what they become is more me than I realize, how to dress babies so that everyday is Sunday until they are weaned from public appraisal, to not concern myself with cradle cap as it is part of the human development, how to listen to doctors but cull the pep talk from the facts. She taught me to sit still in church, how to read the Bible with discernment, how to keep silent in the face of adversity but mentally make a plan to overcome it. She never was able to instill in me the importance of keeping my cards close to the vest as she did but she taught me (along with my grandfather) that women did not have the advantage but could take advantage of the opportunities that arose and how to make the best of the days when there was no opportunity. She asked me not to whine about the shortcomings in life but to understand it is not a perfect world. She taught me that my happiness rests entirely on my shoulders and that nothing else can make me a happy person and that how I deal with what life has dealt me will determine my happiness, and that there is no perfect world.

I saw her shed her first tears when we had to remove the bridal wreath she loved so much, but we had to remove it because she could not breathe when her lungs became so tired from the compression of her ribs. Tears ran down her face, perhaps not from the bridal wreath but the memories attached to it. Her mother gave her that "first slip" to root and she had carried it many miles and on many moves and journeys. Now, the bridal wreath was a sign that her journey was coming to an end.

ItÂs a beautiful day today, the sky is clear and if she were here, we might be out wringing chickens necks or we might be creating a beautiful doily for the hall table but she is not here and the nurseries are selling bridal wreath and I am going to pick up two and plant them at her grave site. She will not have to worry about the breathing thing any longer, she will not have to worry about it, becoming a thing of the past. I am going to give it a place of prominence and she can now have her beautiful bridal wreath with her through eternity without the concern for her health. I hope she knows that I remember the tears that day and am doing what I can to wipe them away. I surely hope she will.

That was a beautiful tribute to your grandmother, a remarkable women. How some had the capacity to accomplish so much extra admidst the neverending demands of survival I will never truly fathom. You have excellent writing skills, draw you into the scenes of what once was.

It was so sad about her bridal wreath. I would have cried, too. Did you ever get them planted at her grave? Hardly any cemeteries will let you plant anything any more.

Thank you, Aliska. Yes, I did, in fact two. The cemetery is one of those that belonged to community members, mainly supporters of the church nearby and our family still has the largest "population" of burials there and we are the main "keepers" so as long as the government does not make it illegal and some of us keep working, maybe we can preserve it. I do hope so.

Oh, I hope so too, as long as the church survives, the cemetery will probably be ok, plus it may be in a country spot, but things are so rapidly changing. My nearest and dearest are buried in cemeteries where you can't plant anything (one if you can, it's pretty shaded by evergreens I don't like), but it's quiet and peaceful there, different feeling from the modern one where my parents are buried with flat markers, carrilon chimes (sp?), and pretty lagoon. It "feels" sterile compared to the older country ones.

I'm so glad you did that. I have many good intentions and "ought to's", but seldom follow through, some would cost a lot of money, impractical, people who didn't get their wishes honored, no markers to memorialize them, that sort of thing.

For some odd reason, I have a fierce loyalty to my family members who have gone before, even though I know they had flaws. I always honored their memories, but this latest surfaced now that I am getting older.

My aunt left the farm, she's deceased now, went to a boarding school inspired by her brother, and became a teacher. She hated cooking for the threshers. I can only imagine. My sister and I own the place still, and it must have been so hot in the summer with those big wood-burning cookstoves.

I do genealogy in the winter months and am on lists about old cemeteries. It's sad what has happened to so many of them, remember riding on horseback on a vacation as a kid near Gatlinburg, TN, up into the hills, saw an old cemetery where the markers were a mess and overgrown with brush, signs of homesteads that once were. Even as a kid, it made me feel kind of sad.