Two weeks ago, I came across photos I took in 1968 of my mother’s gardens. She had given me a small Kodak Instamatic camera for my 15th birthday, and like everyone in the neighborhood (and many in my hometown of Slippery Rock, PA), I admired the gardens she created and maintained.

When my parents moved into their home in 1957, there was no lawn, let alone trees or gardens. They planted grass seed and trees and my mother created her first garden — a rock garden (behind my mother in the black-and-white photo above). The rocks were from places she had traveled with my father and later, with her five daughters. Whenever we traveled — even to see the nearby “sheep and cows” — my mother packed a shovel and crowbar in case she spied a rock she liked. When we vacationed in New England in the summer of 1968, her goal was to find a rock from every state we drove through.

My mother then created gardens that bordered the entire perimeter of her house. I don’t remember where she got her flowers or how she decided what to plant, but her border gardens were gorgeous.

Next, she had my father rent a motorized garden rototiller to break up the soil in part of back yard so she could create another garden.

In 2010, while working on one of my memoir drafts, I decided to go back to Slippery Rock, specifically to see what my mother’s gardens and home looked like more than two decades after I last visited. My parents had sold their home in 1982 to Nancy and Ken Harris, and Ken was serving his third term as mayor of Slippery Rock. Yes, the mayor of the town I was raised in was living in the house I was raised in.

I contacted the mayor and Adrienne and I drove to Slippery Rock and met with Nancy and Ken, who showed me parts of the house interior and then invited me to walk anywhere in their yard. Needless to say, much had changed.

What would my mother think of these images of her garden and yard in 2010? She would surely be heartbroken, but not show it. I am heartbroken, a bit. When I moved into my current home more than 36 years ago, I was determined to carry on my mother’s legacy with gardens, but I never did until after she died in 2018. At that time, I tinkered here and there but nothing ever grew until I hired a horticulturist in 2023. A future post will feature what my gardens look like now and I hope they do justice to my mother’s garden legacy.

I miss my mother, of course, and today would have been her 98th birthday. In whatever garden she’s in now I hope she is having a beautiful day. Meanwhile I must continue to live in this world and be able — as Mary Oliver writes at the end of one of her most famous poems, “In Black Water Woods”:

to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.