I realized the other day that I have been writing the “Gardening Matters” column for the Headlight Herald every other week for the last 20 years. That’s a lot of print. I have covered topics from azaleas to zinnias and everything in between. Slugs, chipmunks, fungus, tools, native plants, raking leaves and so much more. It has been a great experience and the only thing I like better than gardening is writing about gardening.
I have written under the tutelage of about 10 different editors, all bringing their own creativity to the paper. They have also all been very supportive of me even when my columns seem to run on longer than they were supposed to. Like this one.
Realizing I have been writing for so long also made me realize I have been using the same photo since 2003. Kind of like a reverse “Portrait of Dorian Gray” story by Oscar Wilde where Gray stayed young but his portrait aged. In this case, I have aged while my photo stayed young. We are remedying that today with a new photo. Although I admit to liking the old one, taken by friend Cris Roberts, better than the new selfie. Ah, but such is life. Do we ever like photos of ourselves?
But in all these years, I don’t think I have ever written about what led me to gardening in the first place. Time for a trip down Memory Lane.
My first memories of being in the garden were at my mother’s side when I helped her tend her small rock garden and tomato plants in the suburbs of Pittsburgh, PA. We didn’t have a large yard and what we had was taken up with a childrens’ swing set and slide. But Mom found the sunniest spot she could and that’s where the tomatoes grew. The aroma and flavor of a tomato plucked fresh from the vine remains in my memory. Even today, I long to be able to nurture a decent homegrown tomato in Barview but the sun eludes my garden, so that is still but a dream.
A rock garden was all the rage in the mid-1960’s and every member of my mother’s garden club had his or her own version. I remember them being mostly rocks with a few plants tucked in here and there. Nothing fancy: marigolds, zinnias, and a bit of sedum. Today’s rock gardens are all about succulents and sedums and make the best use of alpine plants instead of annual flowers. But my mom loved her rock garden and was proud to show her friends. I did the same, although my main duties involved weeding and if I was lucky, cutting a few flowers to bring inside. I now have my own rock garden, styled in my own way.
My mother came from rural stock and her oldest sister had fabulous flower gardens around her home and an acre of vegetable garden in the rear of her farmhouse in the countryside. Sunflowers taller than the corn, potatoes, beans, zucchini, yellow squash, peas and rows and rows of tomatoes filled the area with marigolds planted around the edges to deter Peter Rabbit and his family. (Not sure how well that worked, though. Fencing would have been better.) My job at Aunt Marguerite’s was to pick the peas and then sit on the porch with a big pan and shell them, all the while visiting with aunts and cousins. This was before sugar snap peas became so popular. Those tomatoes were put to good use as the ones we didn’t eat were canned into tomato sauce for the winter. And the homemade vegetable soup with fresh veggies from the garden was a treat for us all.
After I married Gary and he returned from the Marine Corps, we bought our first house in a rural area to the east of Pittsburgh. We had a large vegetable garden there, with zucchini and tomatoes to take to the Westmoreland County Fair to win a few ribbons. My gardening days were limited to tending the pots around the house as my prime duty in those days was as mother to our infant son.
Our second home was in a small town even further east of the city, so our garden plot was only big enough for 6 or so tomato plants, some corn and beans and a foray into “baby corn” which was all the rage in salads in the 1980’s. By that time, we had also realized beans were a better deal than peas as they didn’t need to be shelled. And my time turned to growing roses.
I grew hybrid tea roses – usually from Jackson-Perkins – like ‘Mr. Lincoln,’ ‘Double Delight,’ ‘Beloved’ and of course the beloved ‘Peace’ rose. They had full sun and hot, dry summers so my rose garden was a sight to see in June and sometimes again in late September. These were the roses I had grown up with at Aunt Marguerite’s farm and had such old-fashioned fragrance that, to my mind, still brings back memories.
Flash forward to September 11, 2001, when we decided – after seeing United Flight 93 fly over our little town – that we wanted to relocate to Oregon to be closer to our son, Gene, and away from the East Coast. Gary had always wanted to live by the shore – albeit the Florida coast – so driving directly west to Tillamook County seemed a good idea: close enough to our son in Portland and yet by the ocean. After looking at a variety of houses from Astoria to Depoe Bay, I convinced Gary we needed to buy the worst house (Barview) with the best potential garden. We pretty much rebuilt the house from the roof down and the gardens from the house outward. Now we are perfectly content with our “English Cottage-by-the-Sea.”
So that’s my story, 22 years later. I hope my faithful readers have enjoyed this ride with me and will continue to read my articles as long as the Headlight Herald will continue to have me grace their pages with my tips and ideas, no matter what the photo looks like.
