When I was 9 years old we moved out of that apartment. We didn't go far but in gardening terms it was a whole new world. My parents bought a house with a huge yard a short distance away and my brother and I had visions of a dog running through that yard. My mother had other ideas. She promptly hired a guy with a tractor to tear up. Two thirds of the lawn was gone in an instant. What for? A garden of course.
Potatoes, asparagus, onions, broccoli, cauliflower and rhubarb were planted, among other things. I actually remember playing hide and go seek in the potato patch as the plants were big enough to hide me (or perhaps I was just that small?).
At that time in our lives my mother worked full time as a nurse and she wasn't able to do all the gardening herself. Instead she doled out the many gardening chores to us kids. Hilling potatoes, shelling peas, sowing carrots, weeding. I confess I didn't like it. No kids like chores but I was particularly discouraged with these tasks. I hated getting dirty. I was terrified of bugs. Being sent to the garden was misery and it was hard work. Worse, I was working to put vegetables on the table. Yuck. As far as I could see there was absolutely no benefit to this at all.
And then flowers were introduced and I began to see things a little differently. I was given a small patch of ground and allowed to plant some seeds - alyssum and marigolds. The colours of these flowers enthralled me but it wasn't enough. Eventually my mother added lilacs and bleeding hearts. The bright colours, scents and shapes of these plants captured my heart. Then there were the gladiolas. Those bright outrageous glads that my mother cursed each spring and fall, digging them out and then digging them back in. I remember her stating she was going to throw them out one year and I begged her to reconsider. They were my favourite of all the plants, unreal in their beauty.
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| Years later I planted bleeding hearts in my own garden, a reminder of my childhood |
And so for several years I was highly involved in gardening, learning to sow seeds, how to hill and not damage roots, digging bulbs, watering, picking vegetables and cleaning them.
And then puberty hit.
