I remember my grandfather’s garden very well. I even have a photograph that I took in 1948 with my Box Brownie camera. Papa looks exactly like my memory tells me – hip boots turned down to below the knee, a heavy jacket and some sort of work pants. Plus an old fedora.
As far as I know, he never wore overalls. He always had a “best” suit for special occasions, a “second-best” that he always changed into before dinner, and a “third-best” that he wore around town. When he went out on the oyster beds or worked in his garden he wore mis-matched combinations of things still “too good to get rid of.”
But, the garden of the picture doesn’t look at all like what I remember. For one thing, it looks like Papa is just cleaning up the remnants. I can’t identify the plants – perhaps potatoes or the dregs of the lettuces or beets? What I remember best are his summer gardens when everything was taller than I.
I loved walking between the rows of peas that towered way above my head. And I loved helping him pick the green beans that my grandmother and I would sit and ‘string’ later on, (I read somewhere that the strings have now been bred out of green beans. It made me a little sad – nostalgic for those companionable times with the women of the household when we snapped and strung talked.)
Also, I remember that the neighbor kids and I would explore the garden for sourgrass and suck the nectar from nasturtiums. We also harvested their peppery green seeds but I don’t remember that anyone used nasturtium parts in salads in those days. Come to think of it, I don’t use them even now.
But I do love the look of nasturtiums and plant lots of them in all the flower beds. Their bright orange and yellow blossoms cheer up the garden at this time of year when most other flowers (at least in our garden) are on their way out. The trailing variety wind their way up the remaining dahlias, into the roses on the fence, and even up onto our porch. They always look so friendly and eager to get acquainted.
I wonder, now, if it was my grandfather or my grandmother who planted the nasturtiums. It doesn’t seem quite like Papa to do it, but by the time of my childhood, my Granny was legally blind and her gardening days were over. Maybe those nasturtiums were volunteers. No matter what, they are a bright memory of childhood here in Oysterville.
I love nasturiums, too, and I remember my grandmother giggling and calling them “nasty urchins” because they always reseeded themselves, even in the sandy salty seaside soil of her garden. And I’ll lay you odds that the new, “stringless” string beans aren’t nearly as tasty as the old varieties.
While visiting sis Cheryl and hubby Virg at Lake Chelan we got some great string beans from a roadside vendor near the Costco in East Wenatchee: the vendor was selling fresh produce from Quincy. Sis prepared them one night with some leftover sausage, and another night with ham: great both ways! As you say they seem to have bred out most of the strings nowadays, but there were a few when I helped prepare them.
My father grew up down the road from his grandparents and lived with them for year after his parents, brothers and sister had moved from the Ozarks to WA. He wrote about the hollyhocks that his grandmother grew in her garden when he was growing up. When he died at age 80 my son and I took his ashes home to Missouri to spread on the lot where my great-grandparents house had stood. A little old garden gate still stood where the front yard would have been and beside it were hollyhocks. Later on I asked a gardening friend if it was possible that those were volunteers from my great-grandmother’s garden of the ’30s and she said, yes indeed. I was sorry that I hadn’t been there when they’d gone to see so that I could have brought the seeds home to plant in WA, a connection between the past and the present and the furture. Thank you for sharing your garden memory and sparking mine.