Violets for the Soul

It’s mush season in southeast Texas. Thanks to a hard freeze last week that sent temperatures into the teens, picture-perfect flower beds have been rendered to soggy messes. And they’re getting soggier by the day with the seemingly relentless rains of recent weather forecasts. Gardeners in the area know there’s a lot of clean-up in store.

Our back yard, a mixture of hardy perennials that’s become a haven for birds and butterflies, is no exception. Salvias are hardly recognizable with their wilted, blackened leaves. Once bright-green society garlic is now the color of straw, piled in sad, slimy heaps. I miss the cheery blues and purples of the morning glories and passion flowers, their vines as bare as empty clotheslines now. Our antique roses are holding up as well as can be expected, but I have doubts as to whether we’ll get many more salads from the winter greens I’d planted alongside them a few weeks ago.

I try not to despair when I look at the Mexican mint marigold, sedums, shrimp plant, ageratum, angel trumpets, Rangoon creeper and heirloom lilies – all like ghosts of the healthy specimens they were just days ago. But I take comfort in knowing that, once spring arrives, they’ll be back. And in many cases, I’ll welcome the familiar faces of friends and family who’ve shared a part of themselves by passing along a bulb, a few seeds, or maybe a cutting or two.

Given the rainy past few days, perhaps the first will be my mother’s grandmother, Selma Anna Boehle Hoefle. Rain lilies from her garden, which Mother shared with me decades ago, reward us after stormy days with rosy pink flowers by the dozen. The bulbs have multiplied over the years, and I’ve carried them with me from house to house, sharing with fellow gardeners along the way.

Each summer my late great-aunt Margaret says hello with the bright-orange blossoms of the Montbretia I dug from her garden in Shreveport many years ago. Resembling miniature gladioli, they, too, multiply profusely. I’ve since shared them with friends and family, including my sister-in-law Martha, who in turn divided a few of her walking irises from her Alabama garden. I love to go out early on a spring morning and watch the blue-and-white orchid-like blooms open.

I’ll look forward to my late Aunt Louise and Uncle Emmett from New Orleans dropping by as the pink, pineapple-shaped blooms of their ginger lilies start to peek up from the soil. From Alabama, my mother-in-law and late father-in-law, Nita and Bill, will be a welcomed presence spring through fall with their red canna lilies, yellow Brugmansia (angel trumpet) and purple Mexican petunias.

But mostly I’ll think of my mother, in whom I lost a role model, friend and gardening buddy when she died more than 30 years ago. I feel comforted by the sight of countless plants she shared with me – daylilies, crinum lilies, wood violets, ferns, clematis, oxblood lilies, spider lilies and more. More than a means to filling the empty flower beds of my earlier gardening days, they have endured to serve as living memories. I have only to look out my window to know that a part of her is still here.

The sprig of clematis, for example, that Mother promised would “take over,” promises to do just that. Each August brings a cascade of tiny white flowers against our back fence, their almond aroma filling the air. Like clockwork, dark-red oxblood lilies appear each September, followed by frilly red spider lilies. A volunteer from her Old Blush rose takes center stage just across from our patio. Daylilies of assorted varieties, divided and transported from Mother’s yard to mine through the years, bloom April through July in shades of red, orange, yellow, maroon and salmon-pink.

Her crinum lily is here to bring us summertime clusters of fragrant white flowers trimmed in burgundy, blooming one, two or three at a time. I remember the day we returned home from Mother’s funeral to find 10 of them blooming all at once, as if Mother Nature had sent her deepest sympathies.

Once, I was honored to have the opportunity to share with Mother a little something from my garden. It was a portion of some old-fashioned white salvia she had admired during an Easter weekend visit. That summer, when we gathered at her house after the funeral, I noticed it had taken root in a bed just outside her kitchen window and was beginning to fill out the stake she’d placed nearby to support it. I like to think that Mother might have looked out her window and smiled to see, reflected in her own garden of memories, my face looking back at her.