Beautiful Dawn. There always was a twinge when I would go see mother in their home too. That there was nothing left of him. I was glad when she moved so it was easier. But I , like you found him with me. In my space. My dad was not a great gardener but he loved it and tried something every year. The only thing that thrived was a Lantana. It was amazing every year bigger and brighter. I wanted to dig it up but mother wouldn't let me. I think she was afraid it would die. I have one here that came out of nowhere by my power pole in Sandy rocks no attention and just as happy as it can be

Beautiful.

My parents kept a pretty garden with flowers and a few vegetables and a peach tree. Their front flower beds were nice, as well as the backyard beds. We had a small yard growing up.

My Dad had a strawberry patch on the side of the house. I must have strawberries too. And do. Dad always enjoyed his little patch of strawberries so much. He liked to sugar them up so they were nice and juicy, and put them on vanilla ice cream as a June night treat.

The other thing is an elephant ear plant. My Dad gave mom Mom an elephant ear in a pot for a birthday gift (I think) when I was about 10. She kept this giant thing indoors in our large den for years--maybe moved it outdoors in the summer. I can't remember exactly--but I do remember her getting it. Maybe she eventually planted it outdoors. She gave me a bulb of it when we bought our first house and it always did well there. I forgot to take a bulb with me when we moved. And it bothered me when we lived in our last house. The beds were already made in that house -- it was sorta "fancy" and I never got around to planting anything other than in pots for the large front porch and deck in the back. HOWEVER, this house is a blank slate--really there wasn't even a flower bed in the front. So...remembering back to our first house, I wanted to make a front flower bed like we did there. I drove to our first house to measure that flower bed, but first knocked on the door to ask. The same couple lived there! And remembered me and I asked if I could measure my (their) flower bed. They said sure and went back in the house. So I quickly pulled up an elephant ear bulb and ran to the car with it. Haha! I'm SURE they would have been okay with me taking one, but it felt weird to ask, so I just took one. They pretty much let the garden go--it looked horrible and it made me feel a little sad considering how much work we put into that little flower bed. They do have 2 small kids now, so I guess I understand. Except I had 2 small kids then and still managed my flowerbed. But, it's probably not a priority for them.

Back to Dad and Mom's house. My dad died 20 years ago, fairly young at age 53. My Mom sold that house 12 years ago, but still has friends on the block. Just a couple of months ago, we (my husband and I) bought a freezer from the lady who lives across the street from that house. I immediately went to look at the strawberry patch. It's gone. In fact, all the beautiful beds and stuff are just overgrown and look awful. My Mom sees this when she visits her old neighbors and I think it makes her sad, but what can you do? It feels weird to sneak around on property where you grew up and played--to think it's no longer yours. Or to see flowerbeds and stuff that you made and it's no longer yours either. But in a way it is yours--just not physically...or legally. :)

Thanks, ladies.

My mom would love knowing she is 85 years old. I was wrong. She is 87, 2 years older than my dad was when he died. She'd probably prefer if I just stuck to saying she is 85.

Kim, I think we all know that miracles occur, and your lantana is a miracle sent to you by your father from Heaven, even if we do not understand what mechanism he used to get the lantana to you.

I have been shocked by how hard it is go be in daddy's house without him being there. Of course, it was hard in the beginning after he died, but I thought it would get better over time. It really hasn't, or at least not much beter. The house still feels empty and "wrong" without him there. I cannot imagine how hard it must be for my mom, but she hasn't wanted to leave it and go elsewhere, so I guess she has enough good memories of life in that house that it overcomes the sadness of him not being there.

The house, of course, looks very different inside as well, but those changes don't bother me as much as the disappearing of his garden and yard did. As we cleaned out closets and consolidated photo albums and boxes of loose photos together, we had a lot of fun with that, and enjoyed showing our spouses old photos they'd maybe never seen before. We also found a typewritten geneology page that takes my mom's family back to the 1750s. None of us kids even knew she had that, so I'm glad we were going through things carefully. Her health is frail and she is hard of hearing now, so we couldn't even really ask her about it (and she probably wouldn't remember where it came from anyway) but my sister-in-law took it home to make copies for all of us kids and grandkids.

Hazel, My grandmother grew strawberries at her house when I was in elementary school, and I too keep a small strawberry patch going here, more because it reminds me of her than anything else. We don't get huge loads of fruit because there's only a few plants, but we cherish every one of them as we hungrily devour them---perhaps because there are so few of them.

It is hard to go back and see a former home after you have left it and it becomes somebody else's house. Our first home was just up the road from my parents' home, and we drive by it going to Mom's house. I like what the current owners have done with it, and I love seeing that the trees have gotten so big, although they make too much shade for someone like me who always needed more sunny space there than what was available.

I laughed when you said you snatched an elephant ear bulb. I hope it grows for you and you have it forever. I think it is fun starting over with a clean slate, but I did that for the last time when we moved here. We knew this would be our forever home when we moved here and nothing has happened to change that.

I am sorry you lost your father so young. I think some of our happiest years together were after Dad retired and was at home more, and I quit my job a few years later to be a full-time wife and mom. We had so much time together, and I could help him and Mom a lot more as they aged. It was so much easier to work together and eat together and go play together once he retired, and those were the years when our son was very young and got to spend time with his cousins and his Granny and PaPa almost every single day. I wish you could have had those sort of happy golden years with your dad too. Moving so far away from them was the hardest part of moving here, but my brother and sister lived very nearby and that made it easier. My dad already had Alzheimer's when we moved here, but it was not too advanced yet and he loved this place. He especially loved the native pecan trees. He never had room for pecan trees, though our next door neighbor had them along the property line and shared the pecans with us. He loved seeing the garden get bigger every year. Even when his Alzheimer's got pretty bad, he might have forgotten our names, and he might not have been sure that we were his daughter and son-in-law, but he always remembered that we were, as he called us, "those people from Oklahoma". That made me giggle.

Our Fort Worth neighborhood is pretty old now, having been built beginning around 1944. My mom is the last remaining resident there who has lived there since the neighborhood was young. She's been there since 1950, but my dad bought the house in the 1940s. Of course, we know almost no one who lives there now as even other residents our own age who lived there when we did now have moved away. Like all old neighborhoods, it had a period when it was sort of declining as the original residents aged and didn't maintain their home or yard or garden like they once did. In recent years it has undergone a renaissance of sorts and all the houses have been remodeled, repainted, replanted, and some have new driveways, new sidewalks etc. Tim and I were the first young couple to move there and redo an old house in the mid-1980s, so it is cool now to see that the entire street has been redone, house by house. Naturally, it no longer feels like our neighborhood, and I guess partly that is because it no longer is our neighborhood, except in our hearts and in our memories.

Thanks for sharing your memories too. Maybe it is because Father's Day is coming up, but something about my dad's garden being gone just really hit hard this time. Or, maybe it is the first time I realized that the last remaining plant he had planted was gone.

Dawn

The gardens I remember my parents having were one in a rented house in Miami, OK and one near Seattle WA. There were vegetable gardens both places. Dad didn't have a tiller so he broke up the Miami garden with a shovel and a rake, a bit at a time after work, starting with enough ground to plant radishes, onions, and lettuce and continuing with tomatoes, corn, squash, beans and okra. Eating from that garden was a treat for me. I learned to love wilted lettuce with radishes and onions. I don't remember there being any flowers or shrubbery on that lot but there were 3 apple trees in the back yard. When my folks bought a house on a hill overlooking Puget Sound it was a new house on a bare dirt lot. Dad poured a concrete retaining wall in the sloped back yard for the veggie garden and Mom got busy planting flowers and shrubs. We were disappointed to learn that we couldn't grow okra there--too cool--and tomatoes didin't get ripe until August, but Swiss Chard and green beans became staples at our house. And we still raised enough lettuce, radishes and onions to have wilted lettuce--although we learned that wilted lettuce was unheard of in WA. Mother bought a forsythia and a hydrangea. Dad planted an apple tree in the back yard. When I got married and moved to OK, Mother dug up a start of both the forsythia and hydrangea and to date I have over 20 forsythia bushes from that origianal one, and the hydrangea has two offspring here as well. And my garden is filled every year with all the veggies that Dad grew too.

My grandmother had a angelwing begonia for as long as I could remember. My aunt gave me cuttings, which all died in my old house (for some reason I couldn't keep any plants alive in that house). I got one from the fling that is doing well so far, and serves to remind me of her.

My Mon had a Christmas cactus for years, it sat in her bedroom by the patio door. I now have it and remember her cussing the thing every year because it wouldn't bloom. She also had cannas along the house and a patch of bearded iris and naked ladies. I've already planned to get some of each this fall to add some life to the landscape.

Dorothy, Thanks for sharing your precious memories too. I bet it was a shock to find yourselves somewhere that you couldn't grow okra! Summertime just isn't summertime without okra growing in the garden.

Mary, How blessed we are to be able to look at our gardens and to somehow see in them some long-ago garden that meant so much to us.

Jen, Well, all I can think of is that your old house was haunted by a non-gardener. Otherwise, I cannot imagine things not growing for you.

Isn't it something how much we're influenced by plants once grown by people we love? We wrap up those precious memories and carry them inside our gardening souls, and when we get a chance, we pull them out and use our memories of those to turn a bare patch of ground, or a front porch with container plants, into a familiar planting area that tugs at our heartstrings.

I confess that our home has family influences in the same way. Perhaps because my grandparents' homes were country homes when I was a child, I found myself recreating their country homes when we built our country home here.

I had to have a screened porch because I always loved my grandmother's screened porch that she had at their country place when I was a very, very young child. I had to have a white picket fence, a round silver stock tank and a windmill for the same reason, though their windmill actually worked and mine is merely decorative. I had to have a barn, though theirs was a white sheep barn and ours is a red, barn-style garage. I had to have geraniums in our first years here, because she always grew geraniums there. I could go on and on, but it sort of astonishes me how well I remember certain things about that house because I think I was only about 5 or 6 years old when they moved away from the ranch to a little country town. I also didn't deliberately set out to make our country home have similar features to theirs, and yet, it happened.

Do you know what I have to remind me of my grandfather's small town house where they lived after they sold the ranch? Grass burs. Common stickers. He was forever walking around the yard, yanking them out of the ground so they couldn't reseed. Now I do the same thing. That's not really a good thing, but it is what it is, and it is a family tradition of sorts that makes me chuckle.

When we first moved here, we were so crazy about country living that we just had to sleep with the bedroom windows open so we could listen to all the night sounds. I especially loved to hear the mourning doves cooing early in the day as it reminded me of being at my grandparents' home and hearing the same cooing in the hours before sunrise. I even liked hearing the faraway sound of a train coming down the train tracks just like I would hear at night at their place. After the frogs started having regular conventions and croaking so loudly all night long that we couldn't sleep for all the racket, we gave up sleeping with the windows open. I still get to hear the mourning doves cooing early in the day when I first go outdoors.

Strolls down memory lane are so much fun!

Dawn

Dawn, I repeat - you need to write for profit. You are an excellent writer!

Cochise, Thank you for the kind words. You are so very kind. This thread sort of wrote itself, you know. I was just thinking about all the feelings I was experiencing at our childhood home this past Saturday, and how much I missed seeing some part of my dad's garden still alive....and I wanted to talk about that. All of us gardeners were made, not born with green thumbs. I know who influenced me and the choices I make, and I wanted to talk about him and I wanted to ask everyone else who influences their garden dreams.

Dawn

Dawn, this was such a sweet thread.

I can SO relate to that Dawn. A very heart warming story. I went through the same thing with our farm where I grew up. It had been years since my mom had tried to grow flowers in our front yard. We lived on a sand hill and it was so hard for anything to grow. It was several years after both of my parents passed away and I was digging stickers in the front yard when i spotted a tiny patch of green. I knew it was a flower and dug it up and took it home. This is a pic of a beautiful peonie. I believe white is the color of remembrance and I cherish this flower. It blooms every mothers day. I think God sent it just for me.

oops, pic did not come thru, let me try again

Lisa, Thanks.

Donna Dot, What a sweet tale. I agree with you that God sent you that peony for Mother's Day. Otherwise, it is too hard to believe it is a mere coincidence that the peony your dug up and brought home just randomly blooms on Mother's Day of all days. I think of events like yours as "pennies from Heaven".....a reminder that someone in heaven is missing you and thinking of you, and at the same time, when you see the peony bloom, of course you are thinking of your mom too. What could be better?

It looks so gorgeous in the photo. I'm so able you were able to dig it up and move it to your place.

Dawn

Don't know how I missed this for all these years. What a beautiful post!