COLUMBINE : FEBRUARY 26, 2007

My mother has kept a garden for what seems like forever. I remember as a child I would be running around the yard excitedly, with sisters and brothers and puppies and neighbors in tow; sometimes we would be wearing dresses and too-big high heels; other times we would be barefoot and looking like hooligans or street urchins. My mom would always laugh and play along; aside from lending us her cut-off bridesmaids dresses and braiding our hair for us, she would oftentimes try to get at us with the garden hose as she worked in the yard. Pressing her thumb firmly over the nozzle’s opening, she would increase her spray radius and send us squealing and shrieking back behind the playhouse.

My mom was always out in one of her many gardens. In the back she had three main gardens--a water garden, a vegetable garden, and a flower garden. When I was young the flower garden was by far the least interesting of the bunch. After all, the water garden had shimmering goldfish, and the vegetable garden had chives, the only item we were allowed to pick ourselves and eat on a day-to-day basis. I remember Mom questioning my sister, Amy, and I, asking if we had been at the chives again. “No,” we would lie, onion breath giving us away. Later on we would feel sick from the potency of the herb, but that wouldn’t stop us from sneaking back to the chive patch the next day, or the day after that.

I did like certain flowers from Mom’s flower garden, though. Amy and I would play at squeezing open the mouths of colorful snapdragons, envisioning their wild tongues and fiery breath licking out at us. We would run our hands over the straw flowers, enjoying their scratchy texture, so reminiscent of beach mats or Easter baskets. Our favorite of all, however, a flower I’m sure all little girls love to gaze adoringly at, was the bleeding heart plant. To this day I find these little dangling hearts amazingly perfect—and the fact that they are pink, of all colors, seems another one of nature’s supernatural wonders. We would daintily touch them with our little girls’ fingers, but we would never dare to pick one. Those are not the picking kind of flower, after all. Besides, if we left them there in the haven of Mom’s garden, we would have the dangling little gems there to gaze at time and time again.

Aside from those three peculiar little floral wonders though, my mind was absent when it came to paying attention to the colorful section on the north end of the yard. Even as I grew into my teenaged years, I couldn’t figure out why my mom would spend upwards of eight hours some days just puttering around in the earthy beds. She would lovingly trim, water, and nourish her plants, no matter how big or how small. She would spend hours in the greenhouses and grocery stores picking out a mere handful of healthy looking plants. She would color coordinate things and pay careful attention to a plant’s needs—“That one will scorch in the sun”; “That one loves the heat up against the fence”. She would occasionally glance at the tiny tags that came with the plant, but more often than not she would already know the information by heart. Sometimes she taught me the scientific names of some of the plants, the memorization of strange foreign words being something she has always enjoyed.

In more recent years, my mom has paid the price for her gardening as premature arthritis has caught up with her. All the joints she uses to dig and turn the earth scream at her the next day—fingers and elbows being the worst, and knees being a close second since she spends the majority of her time on them. The pain, however, can not slow her down—a few Tylenol and a bit of moaning and groaning get her out and about the next day.

All this loving tenderness towards her plants has most certainly paid off as can be seen in the photo above. This bright pink Columbine (aquilegia vulgaris) peeked out over a bustling anthill, above the grove of luminous purple daisies you see in the background. Appropriately star-shaped, it really was the star of her garden in the summer of 2005. We were all sad to see it go once its time was up.

This photo was taken quickly, simply, and without much thought as I pranced through my mom’s garden one sunny mid-morning with our family’s puppy, Josie. I threw a Frisbee for Jo, and in the time it took her to give it a good shake and return it to my hand, I was able to get in a couple of good photos. I never expected to find this photo two years later, in the midst of my February doldrums, in a dusty corner of my camera’s memory card. A few loving touchups and a bit of an Orton effect really made this photo something special. It is just as lovely now as I remember that original flower to be—just what a soul needs on a dull, gray day in February.

And now, with my mom helping me plant my own miniature balcony potted garden this year, I am looking forward to producing some pretty little things of my own. I realize that the type of magical beauty seen in this photo can take dozens of years to achieve, but I won’t let that stop me. My photos of Mom’s garden can carry me over in between my visits to her backyard, as long as I have even one or two vibrant petals to wake up to on my own sunny balcony every morning.

Perhaps my spring and summer endeavors will surprise even me—we’ll see if I can eke out a photo or two from my teeny potted gardens in a few months’ time!

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