As I read a novel recommended by a gardening friend, Barbara Kingsolver’s “Prodigal Summer,” I am taken by the close connection of its central characters to the land they inhabit. Set in Appalachia, the novel brings together farmers, naturalists and entomologists who each see something different in the surrounding landscape. Their varied interpretations of the interconnection of humans, plants, and animals—from coyotes to moths —shows a connection to the natural kingdom that makes me think of my mother, at whose bedside I am sitting reading this novel as she approaches the end of her life.
As her world slows down, we pass the days not celebrating the excesses of the summer, but the bounty of our favorite season – the fall. Early in my stay, my mother sits in the kitchen as I put up jars of apple butter, cooked down slowly with cloves, all-spice and cinnamon that fills the house with the scents we associate with the cooler season and family tradition. The apple butter will be primarily eaten rolled into palacinka – the thin Croatian crepes my grandmother made for both my mother and us (and that my mother occasionally served us for dinner if my father had an evening meeting, with a promise from us that we would not tell my father what she had prepared for dinner). On another afternoon she awakens from a nap to inhale the scent of simmering leeks, carrots, spinach and potatoes that are pureed into creamy soup which is nourishing and easy to swallow. This is our season and always has been. While I fondly remember the summers at our cottage, eating from the vegetable garden, living on corn and tomatoes and anything on the grill, it is the late season harvests of fall that come to mind when I think of my parents – my mother, now 97 and slowing down, and my father, now long-gone, who relished nothing more than setting a bushel of apples from the Michigan orchards into our spare refrigerator to be enjoyed for as long as the Pippins and Roxbury Russets maintained their crispness.
For my family, this season had its magic, which carried all the way into the winter. While our cottage captured the magic of summer, it was the landscape of our home back in Chicago that took us through the rest of the seasons. And while it was filled with plants that my parents loved, my father’s tomatoes and peppers in the vegetable garden, some roses, peonies, false indigo, clematis, and hydrangeas that my mother planted over the years, our yard was not about plants it held but who inhabited it with us. As I check on my mother one evening before bed, I see a ceramic cardinal that I had given to her and my father for Christmas as a young boy, a reminder of a late winter visitor to our garden. I remember my parents staring through the kitchen window for hours at this bird that had alighted on a tree that is no longer—a tree that my sisters do not even remember (perhaps because my adolescent sisters at the time were more interested in the brightly clad male members of their own species than a bird in a tree and I was just a child).
In my memory, the tree was many things—I recall it having the smooth bark of an American beech, the leaves of an ash, and the contorted branch structure of a burr oak. To my mind’s eye, it was the drawing of a tree made by a child of the parts of various species, and what species it was in reality did not matter. My mother does not remember what type of tree it was either, but she can still recollect the cardinal sitting on that branch day after day, each morning around breakfast time.
The tree is long gone and the bed where it was now contains stonecrop, peonies and a few small shrubs. Then, a few years back some red lobelia from the surrounding area seeded itself in. I was surprised that my mother, who is not particularly fond of cardinal red flowers, had not removed it, but she said that the flowers had brought with them something that made her love the plant—hummingbirds that danced about gathering nectar from the tubular flowers of the lobelia, which I had the chance to see one afternoon as they hovered about the flowers.
As much as I was enjoying the book I was reading and the passages on moths, chestnuts, apples, and coyotes that filled its pages, there was something wonderful about the looseness of just accepting what came our way namelessly, the pairings that nature brings us, and seeing them as part of a progression forward.
I will always remember the cardinals and hummingbirds and the tree of many species that held that place in the garden, even as the world around me changes. I also realize that plants, animals, and people—and my mother and father—come and go. And, as a I sit with my mother at this time, I hope these memories will carry me forward for years to come as the reality of the present fades into the past.
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A gardener grows through observation, experimentation, and learning from the failures, triumphs, and hard work of oneself and others. In this sense, all gardeners are self-taught, while at the same time intrinsically connected to a tradition and a community that finds satisfaction through working the soil and sharing their experiences with one another. This column explores those relationships and how we learn about the world around us from plants and our fellow gardeners.
