There is a picture window at our kitchen table and this window allows me to sip coffee and gaze at our back yard with not a single muntin blocking my view. A tall, long-needled pine sits at the center of the half-acre lawn with a fairly perfect circle in the ground below the branches. This roundish area is my Hosta Garden and the plantings are glorious indeed, preening upward with lush leaves of various shades of green and white, some striped and some speckled, but all proud and personal to me.
My mother was a yearnful gardener, ever and always trying something better, something larger. She measured the success of any project in two ways…. how big can she make it and how fast can it be done? Her inspiration for all things dirt came from my Aunt Elayne whose gardens were something to behold. I was a young girl when my aunt planted a cutting garden in the back of her five-acre yard and I watched as she flung seeds with her hands into a large patch of black dirt that had been readied and tilled. The ground looked moist and almost sumptuous. The seeds were a mixture of sweet peas, cosmos, dahlias, snap dragons, coneflowers, salvia, and allium, which were my favorite since I thought they looked like the tiny world discovered in ‘Horton Hears a Who.” (Seuss) My young mind could not imagine the decadence of a cutting garden! Flowers for the cutting! In your yard! Not flowers that were low to the ground that must be secretly cut before your mother sees you cutting off the heads of the only flowers to adorn the walk to the front steps. No. These were flowers planted and planned for the purpose of oh, walking to the back yard in the late afternoon and deciding that a bouquet at the front room table might be just what is missing. Yes, I’ll go out back to my CUTTING GARDEN and just get me some. And so, my mother copied what Elayne did with such grace, and turned it into large rampant swathes of color at the front back and sides of my parent’s large yard in the almost country where they lived. While Elayne was more Monet, my mother was all Van Gogh and I loved her for it. The wild brush strokes with vivid colors to tell an urgent tale of the mind was my mother all the way. I could relate to this need to bend the mind to the requirements of the day, and having an outrageous outlet like digging in the dirt, seeing broad-brush results, was healing for an active thought life.
And so, my mom discovered Hosta. The way she saw it, Hosta was the perfect fill in. A bare patch over there? Plop a tiny Hosta plant and within seconds it would grow into something large and even playful. Splaying out leaves as if to say ‘tahdah!’ was the perfect punctuation mark for Gwennie. Soon (very soon) an explosion of Hosta could be seen from the street and she began to give cuttings away out of necessity.
Living in Chicago with a yard that had recently been a gravel bed, growing anything was tough like a cheap cut of meat. When my mom gave me a cardboard box filled with a dozen or so Hosta cuttings, I thought that I would try them and before you know it, I had something growing in this bad soil next to a cyclone fence. I became a Hosta enthusiast and every year I would cut and transplant and watch while shades of various greens invaded the edges of all my flower beds. It was thrilling for me, a non-gardener, but someone who saw all space as a blank canvas for either artistic expression or precise function, to reach into rotten soil and plant something that actually thanked me for the act. Hosta fulfilled the need for brandished brush flinging paint flecks to the sky and the crispness of this expansion in a confined space. I planted everything she gave me, softening the outline of the yard’s metal fence with green leaves that were proud of themselves.
My mother died a few years later, saddening the very leaves of life itself. I look out my window at the transplanted Hosta that will ever and always go with me wherever I go, and I remember the beauty of my mother and her madcap brilliant ways. I am the luckiest girl in the world.