My mother’s garden, from NY to Hilton Head: Beauty that remains a gift to my daughters

Sometimes a mother’s legacy to her daughters is as intangible as a love of the earth and the fragrance of lilies at dusk.

“The women in our family have always gardened,” I say often to my three daughters, all of them almost 40. They have their own homes now, and they’ve even embarked on tending their own patches of earth. I hope they think of me puttering around my various gardens just I remember my own mother in hers.

My mother’s first garden, begun during my childhood in the 1950s, was a large, ambitious flower bed wrapped around the back of our Old Westbury, Long Island home.

Despite her loving care and in contrast to her own shy spirit, this was an unwieldy, exuberant cottage garden with its own agenda. Tall spider plants marched across the back, vying for space with ungainly masses of phlox, campanula, and hollyhocks. Lupines, foxgloves, yellow lilies, and gloriosa daisies grew thickly in the middle; candytuft sprawled across the edges and outward, nearly obscuring the slate path leading to the outdoor faucet.

Even her border of annuals, tidy at first, took on an independent life, invading the lawn during unpredictable growth spurts in midsummer.

My mother’s mother had been a gardener, too, and I was told that her flower beds in Lawrence, Kansas were impressive.

On their Sunday drives in the country, as my grandfather navigated the back roads, my grandmother, trowel in her lap, scanned the roadsides for wildflowers worthy of introduction to her backyard.

Since my grandmother and my mother were quiet, unassuming women, perhaps their gardens were the most public expressions of their inner selves.

For my mother, the gardening season began officially on Mother’s Day, when my father drove her to the local nursery to buy pansies, petunias, verbenas, snapdragons, alyssum, zinnias, and marigolds. My mother’s floral selections were driven by her strong feelings about color — a reflection, perhaps, of years spent studying art in college.

Blue, her favorite color, found expression in lobelias, delphinium, and bachelor’s buttons, and in the row of irises lining the driveway. Her strong aversion to orange banned that color from our yard, aside from day lilies and poppies, my personal favorites.

My father had preferences, too — “More red in the garden!” he often pleaded — so she bought red salvias and gladioli just for him, and deep red geraniums, without a trace of pink or orange.

Her most stunning addition to the yard, set apart from the main garden, was a Peace rose bush that regularly produced half a dozen blooms at once.

During the long summers of my Long Island childhood, my mother seemed to spend most of the day in the garden. Wearing Bermuda shorts and sporting oversized sunglasses (“dark glasses,” she called them), she devoted hours to weeding the most unruly sections, pausing for an early lunch of leftovers, followed by a nap, before returning to deadhead the pansies, or to fill in a bare spot, or to snip a rosebud for indoors.

When I was 6 or 7, I had my own little garden, an overgrown triangle of ground next to the tool shed. The site must have figured in my mother’s original landscaping plans, but at some point she’d abandoned it, so I adopted it for my own. Its neglected soil supported a few spindly phlox plants, a scraggly wild rose, and assorted woodland wildflowers — renegades from the undeveloped lot next to us — all of which I tended with inconsistent care.

Colorado

Years later, when my parents retired to Colorado, my mother’s garden shrank to a few flower boxes and a modest row of annuals flanking the front walk. “The gophers eat everything!” she complained.

When they re-located yet again, to be near us in upstate New York, my mother could garden as before. With my father’s help, she created a near replica of the Long Island garden, but smaller, and she spent hours there, though fewer than before.

When she died, I was in my 40s with school-age children and a home and gardens of my own.

As we prepared to put her house up for sale, my sorrow focused on her garden.

One dark, wet April afternoon, I went out to her small back yard with a shovel, a few plastic pots, and a fistful of plastic bags. What was left of her annual border lay hidden under clumps of dirty snow. Stalks of assorted perennials projected here and there from the half-frozen ground, sodden and bent over by a cold, driving rain.

It was hard work, but I managed to dig up representative portions of whatever plants I could identify while leaving most of the garden behind — my mother’s legacy for the new owner.

That May I planted a new garden, my mother’s garden, next to our porch and bordered by a low stone wall. The transplants settled in as the weather warmed, and I added annuals as my mother would have done, and my own Peace rose bush.

Hilton Head

Years later, part of my mother’s garden has followed me to my Hilton Head Island home.

What strikes me as important about my mother as a gardener is that she was by no means an expert, and her garden, though beloved by us all, would not have won any prizes. Like most gardens, it was forever a work-in-progress and (literally) a little rough around the edges.

What stood out, though, was my mother’s love of the earth and her need to nurture what she perceived as beautiful.

This deep connection to plants is what she passed on to me, and what l will give to my daughters.

A version of this column was originally published in Long Island Woman magazine.