As our relationships with our children grow longer and deeper, the lessons we teach them do as well. By the time they are older, we have also developed hobbies, routines, and rituals together. What greater life parallels to love, compassion and peace, than the ones reflected in traditions they cherish. Like gardening.
Every Spring since they were little, we’ve stood at an empty patch of ground, my own two girls beside me, pony-tailed, knobby-kneed, tiny fingers clutching a small watering can or flower seedling in fascinated anticipation. I wanted to know something of the earth, to be at one with some small part of it, and wanted my children to as well. So each May, the brown soil becomes their blank canvas, the flowers their paint. Like floral artists, they’ve arranged towers of sunflowers, purple seas of petunias, sundrops of yellow marigolds. They have even spaced out red impatiens in the outline of a big heart against a white impatiens background, and all summer long love was in bloom.
From a lifetime of gardening, my daughters know that a garden is so much more than its plants. Their flower gardens host an annual symphony with windmills spinning and sprinklers spritzing and birds chirping; it is their own rainbow of colors and textures and art, coming around each year, a sundial to their lives. A garden is warmth touching their backs, their mother’s voice in their ears, tilled soil pliant beneath their fingers, the tiny plants so full of promise. They get to do that, each Spring, to hold a promise in their hands.
The promise of fresh tomato slices slathered in mayonnaise.
The promise of picnic table suppers outside in the shade.
All these years later, they plant gardens of zinnias, soaring in heights to thirty-six inches. Red, yellow, pink, orange, they tower in a patch outside our kitchen window. By August, when we wash dishes or prepare a meal, a standing ovation of color waves in at us, a hummingbird hovering close by.
And so my daughters have learned, much like creating a piece of art, to design a peaceful place upon the earth. Their efforts nurture not only flowers, but a symphony, an art form, mother-daughter rapport, a place to sit among flowers, a living painting outside a kitchen window.
