Ann Ferro: Two years ago, a good part of my garden disappeared

I come from a long line of gardening greatness. My mother? She had tour de force gardens filled with an astonishing variety of perennials. Some she bought, and some she acquired by asking complete strangers if she could have a piece of a particular plant in their gardens. You cannot believe how horrifying it was to have your mother pull into someone’s driveway, knock on the door and ask for a piece of a plant she had spied from the road. Oddly, most people would say, “of course”, help her gather the cutting and then become engaged in a lively conversation about gardening while I slumped down in the car hoping that no one I knew could see me. That is how she acquired so many beautiful flowers. I do think that she had some kind of special aura about her that inveigled people to share plants and that gave her an almost mystical power to hang this summer’s geraniums upside down in the basement during the winter, replant them in the spring and have them grow. Who does that? Certainly not me. When I tried it, my geraniums all became a soggy decomposing messes.
My garden which can be described as eclectic, meaning that without the invasive plants and a few perennials sprinkled here and there…it just would be weeds. I paid my grandsons two cents a plant to remove black walnut seedlings. They made over five dollars for that job and even more when I paid them to identify and pull-out goldenrod. If I had to pay them to remove the Bishop’s weed, gill over the ground and ivy, I would be broke.
But…two years ago, a good portion of my weedy overgrown garden just disappeared into a mass of vegetal corpses. The delphiniums, foxglove, cimicifuga, meadowsweet, astilbe, rhubarb and echinacea literally collapsed. Across the lawn, the five-foot-tall peppermint developed some kind of disease and passed on, leaving very ugly skeletons. What kills mint? I loved that mint. When you walked past, its scent would wonderfully attach itself to your clothing. When you mowed the escaped offspring of the mint, the yard smelled glorious. A gift from a colleague and friend, it had lived on the south side of our house across from the autumn-flowering Hostas for twenty years.
No one seemed to know what vectors were involved in this mass carnage. On the advice of my sister who inherited the family’s green thumb … she is a bona fide Master Gardener, we removed all dead or dying plants and watched to see if anything would grow in the blighted areas.
Ajuga and lamium grew with punctuations of celandine. These grew riotously—everywhere. Whatever had slain my lovely taller perennials didn’t seem to affect them. But who has a garden of only ajuga and lamium and celandine?
While I dreamed of a new garden, reminiscent of English gardens full of tall flowering lovelies, replanting anything that required digging was problematic. My physical limitations made it awkward. I had a tendency to fall over when using the spade … which means that I couldn’t use my right foot to push the spade into the soil without falling … so inconvenient….and so my dream garden remained only that.
All was not lost. The next summer, my sister Joan, the Master Gardener, herself with a mending broken leg, drove four hours from her own beautiful gardens in Putnam County with boxes of plants to put in the now empty areas. She brought all kinds of goodies, echinacea, black eyed susans, coreopsis, portulacas and others that I’ve forgotten. I should add that she is younger than me and much thinner.
And this year, with the help of my spouse, meaning he does all the work, I attempted to re-invigorate the garden with Shasta daisies, catmint, pink bee balm, lavender, thyme, salvia, lambs ears, coral bells, and as an ode to my grandmother and the memories of childhood by her side in her garden, three lovely holly hocks. I also fell deeply in love with an exquisite rust colored coleus and red fountain grass.
The hoses on both sides of the house are too heavy for me, so the spouse is now the grand poobah of watering. I keep telling him that I, the brown thumb gardener, am teaching him how to garden. I also have a fence that needs painting.
When I think of my new garden and the hours of driving and planting from my sister and the very hard work that my husband contributed, it has become clear that this garden is something more than its plants, as beautiful as they may be. While we bought Miracle Grow soil to counteract whatever may have been in the existing dirt, this garden was nourished with the powerful caring of my family, helping me to have what is important to me, but beyond my physical reach. Finding now, as I wander through my garden, ministering as I can, that this garden is grown with love made tangible, a testament to what true family gardening prowess means.