Mother’s Day in the garden

On Mother’s Day, I must honor the women who taught me to garden.  None of them set out to teach gardening, but instead they demonstrated it by example.  Photos weren’t as easy to take when I was a child as they are now, and so most of the gardens remain only in my memory, but here are a few photos.

My first teacher, besides my parents, was my paternal grandmother, Goldie Layton Haynes. She lived across the cow pasture from us, and I made nearly daily visits to her home.  She included my sister and I in whatever she was doing, and we learned to garden by osmosis.

She grew up picking cotton while helping her parents on rented land, and she and my grandfather grew most of their food.  When my father was a child, they sold butter, milk, eggs, and vegetables by mule and wagon in a neighboring community.

I remember helping her pull weeds, pick flowers, and  harvest corn, watermelons, and sweet potatoes. One of my favorite memories is walking in the soil barefoot, which had cooled by the October weather, and helping to harvest sweet potatoes that had  been loosened by my father’s plow.

She died in 1984, when I was 9.  This photo was taken within five years or so after her death, when my aunt and uncle, Jane and Eugene Haynes, restored the house and maintained her garden.  My sister and I enjoyed helping them in the garden.

My maternal grandmother, Louise Hyder Henson, also taught me to garden.  She spent many years working the fields with her family, and she also helped to grow much of her family’s food.

I saw her mostly on Sunday afternoons, and so I wasn’t in the vegetable garden with her much, but she became agitated after sitting too long (just like I do) and would venture to the garden to pull weeds or to clip flowers.  This physical activity helped her stay healthy into old age: the last time I saw her before she had the heart attack that resulted in her death she was in the flowerbed helping me dig up plants to take to my garden.   Here she is in 1970 in her garden.

My mother and father, as well as my aunts and uncles, also taught me to garden.  I was expected to help as a child, and while their teaching might have focused mostly on “Don’t cover the seeds too deep, don’t waste the seeds, don’t leave the weeds and pull up the plants,” as is necessary with all children, I learned a lot by just being out there with them daily.

One of the most important lessons I learned, and something I see new gardeners struggle with, is how to handle the inevitable disasters and failures that happen in the garden.  My attitude, and the thoughts of most people successful at anything, not just gardening, is to try again.

If something dies, well, it might do better next year.  Or maybe there is time to replant this year.  Perhaps the weather became too hot or too cold or a plague of grasshoppers attacked the garden: things beyond your control.  You might have even pulled up the plants and left the weeds (I have!).

Disasters happen.  And when they do, maybe someone has some plants or vegetables  they will share with you.  Replant.  Just don’t give up.

My relatives couldn’t give up.  Gardening supplied their food, and without fresh vegetables from the garden, their diets would have been severely limited to pork and corn.   They might have suffered pellegra, the nutritional deficiency caused by a lack of green vegetables, common to many of the cotton farmers in the South who didn’t have gardens in the early 20th century.

Here is part of my mother’s garden with myself and two of my children.  I don’t, at the moment, have access to photos of her in the garden.

These girls are learning to garden by osmosis also.  If something dies, we try again next time.  This picture was taken about 8 years ago or so, and they have grown into real helpers in the garden.

If you want to garden, or if you want to teach your children to garden, just start planting something in whatever space you have available.   You don’t have to spend a lot of money, or any money if you have friends or relatives to give you starts of plants or seeds.

Read books, consult websites, or even better, if you have no gardening heritage, knock on the door of the neighbor with the beautiful yard and ask for some advice. I am sure he or she would enjoy helping you.  Your plant-loving neighbor will also find some plants or seeds to share from their own garden, and they will help you find the perfect spot to plant them in your garden.

One book that inspired me to write this post is Deep-Rooted Wisdom by Jenks Farmer.  My town’s garden club sponsored a talk by him in March, and I counted myself fortunate to be one of the recipients of this wisdom.  My mother and I share this book, and I will soon have to pass it along to my sister and my aunt.