Love in the Garden

With Valentines Day rushing upon us and the weather Cassandras warning me of plummeting temperatures and precipitation (and here I mutter “Oh Lord, if it’s going to turn cold now, please send my 4 inches of tulips an insulating blanket of snow), I find myself inside trying to put together personal associations of love and gardening.   There are many traditional ones; in art, in music, in literature. The Victorian tune “Come Into The Garden, Maude” tickles my inner ear at times when I begin to rhapsodize about the joy’s of a garden. I remember a garden wedding also, in an old Colonial Virginia manse, which should carry with it many love-like associations, but instead I can only remember being both embarrassed that it was my 4 year old who found the old well top to perform his version of aerobics on during the service and that it was my 35 year old who was supposed to be watching him, since I was a member of the wedding party.  That and the then unknown fact of a water filed shaft beneath that ancient tin lid.

Then there are those visions, not wholly imaginary, of me, like Bailey White’s sister, in my white dress with insertion lace, drifting through the garden on a misty spring morning. Like some floral perfume add or a scene from one of those antihistamine promotionals, my hair tumbles curling down my back and the breeze lifts my delicate skirt to float gently about my legs.  What doesn’t show up in the vision, of course, all shrouded in mist as it is, are the blue rubber gardening boots I’m wearing and the fact that the gown  is really a nightgown.  There are even some moments, romantic beyond belief, when I really can stand beneath the plum tree or one of the taller roses and, just as they are about to shed their petals, give it all a shake and let the flower bits snow down onto me like those good daughters in the fairy tales.  But still, when I seek love, and not just romance, in the garden I harken back to an afternoon - probably April, likely I was 8, and home from school on one of those oh so precious and rare days that Mama would let me have a time out day. Mama was planting gladiolas. “GLADiolas” I thought. Glad to be out of school. Glad to be digging in the dirt. Glad to have Mama all to myself. In my memory there are no other people on earth.  The flat round corms, like turbans or the crown on one of the kings in the Christmas crèche, some of them with last year’s ghost shape still on top. The new ones that were a little more golden colored than the ones who had spent time in the ground in August, fattening for the following spring.  But most of all I remember how loved I felt as we talked quietly, easily, unhurriedly and prepared, as gardeners have done since the beginning, for summer’s bounty.
 When I plant gladiolas now, I always feel that warmth of Mama’s love washing around me. 

I would love to hear your story.

Bess Haile,
Waxing eloquent in her Zone 7 garden in Upper Tidewater Virginia.