Our South Garden
I don’t know if it’s my dimming memory or if I just haven’t paid good attention in the past, but it seems to me that this is the most spectacular springtime ever. Our garden is ablaze with color and I have only to look across the road to the churchyard, itself abloom in all its glory, to know that our own yard is but a small reflection of the greater world. It truly feels like paradise right here in Oysterville.
Everywhere there are rhododendrons just bursting forth or already in full, glorious color. Lilacs send their fragrance from one side of the garden to the other; we have hot pink peonies and yellow day lilies in bloom and, amazingly, camellias still coming on, as well. Everyday there is a new delight, a new reason to be thankful.
My Dad, Bill Little – 1980
I am ever grateful to my dad for planning and planting the scores of rhododendrons on this property back in the seventies. With the guidance and assistance of Paul and Steve Clark, he managed to surround the house with plants that keep the yard in bloom almost year ‘round. The most glorious color show of all came right in time to celebrate his May 12th birthday. Gradually, though, the dates have moved up so the height of things is right now – a full two weeks earlier than he planned. Undoubtedly, climate change and global warming account for that.
I think about my grandmother, too. A hundred years ago she worked in this very garden. Years later, in the 1940s, she wrote to Willard:
Willard Espy, 1914
My first startling memory of you was the year [1914] before you went to school. This made you four. I was working in the garden and you came along and asked what I was doing. ‘Planting forget-me-nots,” I answered. Then very softly to yourself I heard you say,
“Silently one by one in the infinite meadows of heaven
“Blossomed the lovely stars, the forget-me-nots of the angels.”
Where and how at that age you had gathered this verse from Evangeline we never solved.
Even now, I have an ache that my beloved Granny began to lose her sight even before I was born. By the time she was in her sixties, the garden was lost to her except in memory. How thankful I am that I can enjoy looking at it in my own old age – a pleasure that was cruelly denied to her.
Perhaps it is thoughts such as these – of loved ones in whose footsteps we walk – that make us call cherished beauty spots “paradise on earth.” Whatever the reasons, I am thankful.
How lovely that you are able to steward your grandmother’s and father’s garden!