I was slowly waking up one morning a few years ago, listening as I always do to the news on NPR from Oregon Public Broadcasting. They were in the middle of an interview with Lois Lowry, the author of a book called The Giver that has been released as a movie this summer. Not knowing much about novels for today’s young people, I was only half listening. Until Ms. Lowry said what I take to be a very profound statement: “As female hormones decrease, they are replaced by an overwhelming desire to grow delphiniums.”
Well, that woke me up and I got out of bed to write it down so I wouldn’t forget it. I know in my heart that’s a true statement. At least for most of the women I know today.
As a child, I was enthralled by my Aunt Marguerite’s fabulous vegetable garden that took up a plot larger than the house I was living in. She grew everything from corn and beets to zucchini, radishes, onions, carrots, broccoli, and cauliflower. And, oh, those tomatoes: large, round, warm from the sun, and that perfect flavor. I can still remember the taste of those tomatoes. It was there on her small farm I learned to love tomatoes. Her family – and mine when we visited in the summer – was almost entirely fed from that vegetable garden. And there was always plenty to send home with us when we left. And at the end of the summer, Aunt Marguerite could be found in the summer kitchen where she canned the last of the garden produce to be used for the winter. It’s just what she did.
Being a “city girl,” I was always amazed at the abundance of that garden. And the vegetables and fruits were beautiful… not a bruise or a mark to be seen. No insect damage, no diseases. And no chemicals. How she did it, I will never know, but Aunt Marguerite was found in the garden from dawn until the day became too hot in mid-morning, and then again in the late evening as the day started to cool. It was her passion.
Ah, but as she aged, new plants started to appear in the vegetable plot. At first, there were marigolds around the perimeter. “To keep the rabbits out,” Aunt Marguerite would explain. “They don’t like the smell of the marigolds.” That seemed logical to me. Then came the gladioli that were planted between the corn and the peppers. And soon there were petunias and zinnias interspersed with the tomatoes and the onions.
Instead of looking in great disarray, this garden became even more beautiful. In her understated way, Aunt Marguerite had gradually added floral accents to her gigantic vegetable garden and the result was a happy mixture of bright yellow zucchini flowers next to the… yes… blue delphiniums. My lovely, wise aunt had recognized the importance of including beauty in one’s life. She would tell me, “Man cannot live by bread alone” and as a child I puzzled to understand that phrase’s meaning. It wasn’t until many years later, long after Marguerite had passed away, that I came to understand the concept.
My mother, too, loved gardening but she leaned more toward the garden with lots of colorful annuals. A couple of tomato plants would be added in the one side of our house that got full sun, but they were as an afterthought. It was the flowers that my mother loved.
It took me several years after our son was old enough to go to school to learn to appreciate gardening as a relaxation exercise. I found myself following my mother’s track, also preferring flowers to vegetables. I moved on from annuals to perennials and from perennials to foliage plants, all of which hold their own beauty.
Now, as I work in my own Oregon garden, I still have no vegetables, only flowers and foliage plants. I did not even plant a tomato this spring, much to my sorrow as this might have been the one summer warm and dry enough to ripen a tomato in Rockaway Beach. But I love my garden and take great pleasure in the beauty that surrounds me. It’s true: I can’t grow delphiniums, despite years and years of trying. Something in my personal hormones seems to repel that particular plant. But, if I am honest with myself, I have to admit I still have that overwhelming desire to grow delphiniums.
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