My Garden Went Unruly
A Memorial
I have taken a new job this spring, caring for plants at a garden center in the Smoky Mountains. Working with plants suits me well. The heirloom tomatoes include Cherokee Purple, Brandywine, Hillbilly, and Mr. Stripey. They take me back to 2013 when my garden went unruly from all the summer rain, nothing short of a deluge. I considered it a miracle the tomatoes survived. But then, as always, I planted heirlooms that year. And it’s a good thing I did. They are genetically predisposed to thrive in misty mountain weather, officially a temperate rainforest where I live.
The unceasing rain for two weeks straight calmed me. It sent me inside to sleep, exhausted from the emotional turmoil of my life. The serial deaths, fatal disease diagnoses of close friends, family members, and even myself, layered with family secrets that had finally come to light, had all been too much. I needed to let Sky Father do the crying for a while.
Once the rain passed, like grief which also passes when allowed to fill up and empty out again, I returned to the garden. I pulled the waning beans and turnips, picked a few handsome tomatoes, and listened to the crows. They told me to plant a Fall garden. Crows love a garden. And it would be my first. It is a healing and spiritual practice for me to pull vegetables up by their roots and weed out what is no longer needed. Everything eventually breaks down, composted by Earth and the elements, and returns to the garden. My soul longed for such a return.
One morning, while contemplating marigolds, morning glories, and Appalachian heirloom bush beans, it dawned on me. I had planted my humble raised bed garden with seeds passed down from friends who had since passed on. It had become a memorial garden. How strange the evolution of this garden, I thought to myself as a crow cawed overhead. It happened like this:
My love of gardening began in my adoptive mother’s garden, where I lived in Miami, Florida, surrounded by abundantly lush tropical plants. That also created in me, I think, a propensity toward exotic people, animals, and places. The grey interior of my upbringing contrasted against the explosion of South Florida color.
Mom grew an extensive rose garden and filled our home with the heavenly scent of her award-winning roses. She busied herself for hours on end, tending to roses. I never knew what Mom was really going through or what secrets she kept. Many things were left unspoken. Those she said best in the color of a rose.
Then, at age nineteen, I married my first husband, a nurseryman. He had a fetish for orchids, nature’s sexiest, laciest, and most evolved family of flowering plants. I also loved the beauty and seductiveness of those sexually advanced flowers that needed constant care and attention, frequenting the backyard to inhale their perfume.
We started a small nursery business during our marriage, and I became a grower of cacti and succulents. Delicate cactus flowers emerging from the sharp needled armor of protection intrigued me, and unlike orchids, they required little maintenance. Cacti taught me a thing or two about my defensiveness and need to be protected.
My love affair with the prickly plants lasted into my third marriage, which landed me in the Desert Southwest. There, I knelt on the ground in awe to see not a propagated or imported cactus from Arizona but wild-growing cacti in full bloom spread across the desert landscape. I had arrived.
The desert witnessed the end of my third marriage. Seven years later, burned out from being on the road, I returned to Highlands, North Carolina, and the healing blue-green mountains where my parents owned a summer home and I had spent my childhood summers. As my parents neared the end of their life, I remarried for the fourth and final time. Chuck Willhide (aka the GreenMan) and I have been together for 25 years.
After selling our home on the Blue Ridge Divide, Chuck and I bought land near Cherokee with a remarkable mountain view, which we terraced for a garden. I hauled dirt from our previous garden that we had spent years building because I felt attached to its rich dark soil. The new one would be a memorial to Mom in gratitude for the beautiful gardens I remembered as a child.
That memorial garden never came to be. After the economy crashed in 2008, Chuck and I sold our land in the Cherokee Qualla Boundary and moved to Asheville. We rented a house to be closer to our children and grandchildren. Still determined to grow a garden, we hauled dirt obsessively a second time. That is where the heirloom tomatoes survived the deluge of 2013, the summer after the fall my mother died.
During the last year of my mother’s life, with her in Miami and me in the Smoky Mountains, I tended that garden to connect with her and to my own tenuous roots. I used her gardening gloves and hand shovel and cried at the thought of missing her. She was not my only mother, but the only mother I knew. Mom died in the late fall of 2012, very close to the 12.21.12 alignment. The coming spring in 2013 would demand every ounce of willpower I had to plant the garden. It felt so empty with her gone. I felt empty.
I save my seed each year in the fall to be planted again in the spring. That spring after Mom died, with hands in the dirt by the turning season’s grace, I placed each seed in the ground with a newfound faith. Though one may descend into the underworld, there is always the ascent. I learned to trust that death follows life, as sure as life follows death.
Everything has its roots in the unseen world.
The forms may change, yet the essence remains the same.
Every wondrous sight will vanish, every sweet word will fade.
But do not be disheartened,
The source they come from is eternal,
Growing, branching out, giving new life and new joy,
The source is within you.
And this whole world is springing up from it.
— Rumi
The memorial garden did come to pass, but not like I had planned. It unfolded over time in an unexpected way from seeds that I had saved: marigolds, morning glories, and bush beans passed down from friends passed on so that Mom’s memory isn’t the only one it holds.
The French Marigolds came from my friend, Joe Gatins, and his North Georgia La Gracia garden in a simple gesture of spreading and sharing beauty. A stout man and avid gardener, ruddy-faced Joe grew up in France and loved good wine. After moving from Paris to Atlanta, and Atlanta with his wife to the Appalachia Mountains, where I met him, he became the first certified organic grower in Rabun County. Gatins also served as president of Georgia Forest Watch to ensure the preservation of our woodlands. An award-winning newspaper reporter and special projects editor who cooked, canned, hiked, sang songs in French, and threw clay pots and big parties, Joseph Francis Miguel Gatins published a compelling biography titled, We Were Dancing on a Volcano: Bloodlines and Fault Lines of a Star-Crossed Atlanta Family 1849-1989.
Gatins entrusted the production of his audiobook to me. He narrated the book in a deep rich voice, and he and I spent a crazy amount of hours in my studio capturing the best recording. Then Chuck and I spent many more hours cleaning up his heavy breathing on the audio tracks. I found the unsentimental social history and adventures of more than five generations who made their mark on Atlanta and Paris educational and entertaining. I was honored to know him and to learn his story. Joe passed away too young on 9.11.12 at age 65, two months before Mom. His memory lives on to this day in a riot of yellow and orange French marigolds that bloom on my balcony a La Gracia de la luz.
The morning glories in the memorial garden have a story, too. They came as a birthday present from my granddaughter’s father. They readily self-seed and aggressively spread, necessitating systematic removal, which may tell you a thing or two about her father’s nature. My granddaughter knew him for only a few short years. A troubled soul, he died too young but left her with two half-sisters. However, the memory of his sweeter side lives on in the garden. When Chuck and I moved into an apartment, we hauled our dirt for a third time to my daughter’s house, where my granddaughter also lives. Her father’s persistent morning glories, troublesome, unruly yet beautiful and now growing in their garden, remind me to take my life one day at a time.
The heirloom bush beans were yet another gift from an Appalachian neighbor on the Blue Ridge Divide. I save the beans and share them with friends each year who plant them in their gardens to spread the lineage and the abundance. One such friend calls them “forever” beans because they keep on producing all season long. Perhaps it will be in one of those friend’s gardens that my memory, too, will live on.
My garden prayer:
May we grow old like cultivars tended by the wise gardener’s hands. May we retain our ancestral memories like heirloom seeds passed down from an earlier generation until the time, stardust and golden, we find our way back to the garden…
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Joe Gatins reading the Eulogy from Dancing on a Volcano, and Thea’s title song from My Mother’s Garden.
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