Gardening in Our Older Age
My grandmother had the queen of all gardens, an acre of formal blooms, designed in a circle with a flagstone path down the middle, koi ponds on both sides of the path. I’m guessing she had some kind of gardening help, but when I visited every summer in my pre-adolescence, and she was well into her 50s, I would accompany her and her basket to the garden behind the big stucco house in Glen Ridge, New Jersey. I don’t recall ever helping her there, but I do recall her own weeding and tilling and planting. The fish lived in a bathtub on the third floor of her house in the winter, while she and Grandaddy Bill vacationed in Florida. John, the chauffeur/butler, had lovingly transported the koi from garden to tub.
When Bill, my grandmother’s second husband, died, she sold the house and the garden separately, as the back gate to the garden opened to the street behind the house. She moved to Greenwich, to a first floor, airy apartment that backed up onto the high school’s playing field. There was no room for a garden there.
Our family of five lived 20 minutes away in Riverside so my grandmother tilled a rectangular plot on the far side of our driveway, next to the neighbor’s garage, for her garden. She gardened regularly into her late 70s. I don’t think she was ever interested in growing vegetables, just flowers.
My mother’s garden was along the fence between our house and our other next door neighbor’s. She also planted flowers. She never claimed to be an expert gardener, as my grandmother was, just one who loved color and flower arranging. She was president of the local garden club more than once. I entered the children’s flower arranging contest for their annual garden club show. I won one year when I was perhaps eight or nine, for a bridal bouquet (miniature) my Madame Alexander doll carrried. She was dressed in her wedding dress. My father must have wired the bouquet to her hands.
My own gardens have been kind of hit and miss. It has never helped that my husband would — and still does — turn off the watering system when it rains, never bothering to tell me that he has done this until all of the plants I have lovingly planted are dead. I have a garden in front of our house in Berkeley. Most of it was planted by prior owners and I have augmented the garden with plants from a wonderful nursery in Richmond. These tend to be plants I’ve admired in someone else’s garden and want for my own. Only the front of the garden, bordering the sidewalk gets direct sun so I’ve had to experiment and learn which plants thrive in partial sun or shade and which just crumple up and play dead.
I have a friend and neighbor who is a master gardener. Her garden rivals my grandmother’s original one. We are both in our 70s now. She walks her dogs past my house almost every day and when I see her she gives me a raft of instructions. “You’ve got to prune the tall grasses in front of the Manzanita tree so it gets some sun. Your daisies are getting overgrown. You need to separate them.” I dutifully follow instructions. People who walk by my house (it’s a major walking route in Berkeley) sometimes say how beautiful my garden is. I smile for my mother and grandmother who taught me what little I have absorbed over these many gardening years.
