My Motherline Garden

I started my balcony garden early this year, betting that our morning light and sheltering wall would get us past a blustery March. The bet paid off.

I come from women who grew things, but they did so for different reasons.

Mamaw planted to eat, preserving the rest to fill a freezer in the breezeway. Her kitchen was pine — thick and real, not the manufactured stuff that came in sheets. The cabinets matched the walls, and above the sink there was a little band saw valance with a design that made me think of “Heidi.” The “wandering Jews” lived along the crown molding, trailing a strand of twine toward the window. To my memory, they were her only houseplant. I don’t remember seeing a bouquet of flowers or even a repurposed bottle with stems anywhere in her house.

Mom started gardening indoors with a huge staghorn fern. After we kids were off to school, she “puttered” for an hour or so, watering, singing, and shaping her indoor garden before her work day began. She was the one who told me about a book, The Secret Life of Plants, which claimed that "sweet talk" and music encouraged plants to grow. Now that she’s in Arizona, her back porch is full of succulents in containers, punctuated by little figurines and fairy lights. She delights in it.

So do I.

It was Mamaw’s mother, “Mimi,” who kept what I think of as a flower garden. Perennials usually found around old outhouses dominated the landscape: bearded irises and day lilies, which she called tiger lilies. They came back without fuss and kept on spreading and they anchored the beds against the siding of her house. Below them, she planted annual impatiens that overspilled the bricks separating the beds from the sidewalk.

Inside, Mimi set stems in little jars of water on the window ledges and in a vase on her round pine table. She was a fancy woman on a poor woman’s budget.

Readers who followed the Buckskin serial know that, like my mother, I keep mementoes of the people I love close by. My limited living space requires me to get choosy — but two of Mimi's planters made the cut.

First, the lady head vase. After World War II, Japanese potteries exported huge quantities of ceramics to the U.S. at low cost. American florists and dime stores became their primary outlets. Florists especially liked them as containers for corsages, small bouquets, and holiday arrangements.

I imagine Mimi getting my lady head vase from her second husband, the one whose slippers I’m wearing in this painting where the impatiens are spilling over. The story of the painting is for another time.

Then there’s the children-on-the-tricycle vase, sitting on the corner of my desk. I imagine it sitting on a hospital bedside table in Barstow, California the day I was born.

I change the flowers in these vases every week and send a picture of them to my mom. She usually tells me that the lady head vase reminds her of Mamaw’s sister, the one who died of TB before she could receive the newly discovered antibiotics—the miracle cure of the day.

Every morning, here I am, moving things around on a balcony, watching what takes, what settles, what insists on staying and what needs to go. Not planting for food. Not quite arranging for show. Something in between.

Above me, the fake wasp nest I made from a shopping bag does its job, keeping this year’s queens at bay. I can’t remember if it was Mamaw or Mimi who taught me that trick.

Someone up the mother line did.

I’m getting ready to launch the print and ebook editions of Buckskin Rides Again. If you read ebooks, will you answer two questions?