Sixty years ago, or maybe longer ago than that, someone set out boxwood shrubs to decorate the yard of my grandparents’ home. I assume my grandmother set them out; perhaps the people from whom she and my grandfather bought the house and the land planted them even earlier.
Boxwoods are expensive shrubs, and she surely wouldn’t have had the resources to spend on them. Maybe she rooted a cutting from someone else and planted it. I will have to investigate the source of them further.
However they arrived on the property, my memories of summer evenings on the porch are tinged by the scent of boxwood. I planted some boxwoods at my home in Blythewood, but they do not like the heat here. They are still alive, and I hope they live until I can move them somewhere more to their liking.
Last week, I harvested boxwood cuttings from those shrubs, as well as some magnolia leaves from the gigantic tree that she planted in the 1950s. I am planning ahead to make wreaths for next Christmas.
What would she say if she could see this wreath I made from the cuttings and am now posting pictures of on my blog, on the Internet, for the world to see? She died in 1984: there was no Internet then.
I took my youngest two children into the woods near her house to cut holly berries. Before we cut the berries, we went farther into the woods to see the creek. In the 25 years in which I have lived in the flat-lands of Columbia and Charleston, I forgot about how steep the hills of the Upstate of SC can be, and I unwisely took my four-year-old and my ten-year-old down the hill to the creek.
My older child was on her own: she was long enough to snag herself on a tree if she started sliding, but I had to carry the four-year-old. I figured with one slip he would start rolling and would end up in the creek.
Gym devotees: an excellent workout is carrying a preschooler down a hill, carrying him while hopping from stone to stone in the creek to avoid wetting your feet, and then carrying him back UP the hill until he gets to land flat enough that you no longer worry about him rolling back into the creek.
After he got to more level land, he walked right under the overhanging brambles and bushes while my other daughter and I struggled through them. I guess being short does have its advantages, and he is lucky that he’s lightweight or he might have had to take his chances with the creek and the hill.
I spent a lot of time in those woods as a child. My grandmother took me on walks, and a favorite past-time of my sister and me on hot summer afternoons was visiting the creek. I am certain I learned to jump on rocks across the creek during the summer when falling into the water didn’t matter, instead of in December, when it most definitely DOES matter.
Next November, watch out for wreaths made of greenery cut from the plantings my grandmother made decades ago. I don’t think she minds my harvest.
