Garden Grief

by Linda Rodriguez

We're getting ready to sell our house, pack up, and move to a much smaller house with a much smaller yard about eighteen blocks from the big old house where I've lived for forty-two years. Making this move is the right choice for me, I'm sure. This house has been a wonderful house to raise my daughter and two sons in. It's been a house where many other people could come and feel welcome, including two foster sons and a nephew who needed a home, as well as grown brothers and sister who needed a place to live at various times in their lives. When my kids were small—and even teenagers—this house was neighborhood central for all their friends. One of my oldest son's friends told me the other day that he thought he had spent as much or more time in our house as he did in his own when he was growing up.

You might think, under those circumstances, that I'd be a little teary and grieving over leaving the old home place, but I'm not. This house was great for many years, but now it's not—too big, too old, too many stairs, too much maintenance on house and yard. I'm quite ready to move on with a fond farewell.

What I am grieving over is the loss of my gardens. Our buyers intend to just clear-cut the yards in front and back and put them into grass, and of course, that's their prerogative once we've closed. As if the gardens know this is their last spring and summer, they have been magnificent—one last burst of glory. We've unfortunately been too busy downsizing and preparing for this transition to take any photos, but we've marveled at what the unusual long spring, heavy rains, and shockingly mild summer have done for the flowers.

The photos on this post were taken a couple of years ago during more usual weather conditions and right after a thunderstorm that had knocked down iris and peony blooms, so it doesn't look nearly as lush as it does right now. Here's the list of what my gardens contain, front and back, though not all of it blooms at once, of course.

Plants In My Garden

Crape myrtle

Southernwood

White peony

Bowl of Beauty peony

Yellow iris

Purple iris

Various bicolored iris

Peace rose

Large old species rose

Chocolate mint

Native daylily

Native goldenrod

Milkweed

Butterfly weed

Native hydrangea

Native geranium/hardy geranium

Butterfly bush

Lamb’s ears

Costmary

Mugwort

Fennel

Rue

Lemon balm

Peppermint

Oregano

Tansy

Sweet Annie

Sage

Wild strawberry

June-bearing strawberry

Red clover

Various hybrid daylilies

Various hybrid Oriental lilies

Missouri primrose

Black-Eyed Susan

Purple coneflower

Bouncing bet

Wood sage

New England aster

Sweet autumn clematis

Naked ladies/ American amaryllis

Liatris/gayfeather/blazing star

Bee balm

Columbine

Mayapple

Lily of the Valley

Yellowbells

Periwinkle

English ivy

Honeysuckle

Gladiolus

Petunia

Marigold

Wax begonia

Wormwood

Daffodil

Various colored tulips

Common violet

Rose of Sharon/American hibiscus

Yarrow

Hen and chicks

Sedum

Marigold

Portulaca/Moss rose

Red and purple salvia

Hardy chrysanthemums

Sunflower

As you might expect, I have a wide variety of birds, including mockingbirds, turtledoves, woodpeckers, bluebirds, goldfinches, and hummingbirds, plus butterflies, including endangered Monarchs, four kinds of bees, including endangered earth bumblebees, etc. visiting and living in my yard. I've kept it organic for twenty years now with the help of a compost bin.

My husband has taken over most of the gardening in recent years, as it's become more difficult for me to kneel or sit on the ground to work. Consequently, this loss of our garden is hitting him even harder than it is me. In our new much smaller space, we'll become potagers, as the French would put it—people who garden in pots. I've promised my husband that he can take as many plants to the new house as he is willing to dig and plant in big pots. Of course, he won't be able to dig up and take everything. There simply won't be time or energy for that. So he'll have to decide what he most wants to save from our old gardens.

One of the advantages of this new kind of gardening will be that I'm able to join in gardening again, because I can sit in a chair and work with the plants in the big pots. I'm truly looking forward to that. I have missed the joy and peace of working in the soil. Nonetheless, I'm grieving for our gardens that must be left behind and later destroyed, not as hard as my husband is, but certainly grieving still. I remind my husband and myself that we will still have a garden and lovely blooms, fragrant foliage, and useful herbs in the new place. But it's hard to leave what's been a labor of love for so many years.

Have you ever had to leave a garden behind? How did you handle it?

Linda Rodriguez's Plotting the Character-Driven Novel, based on her popular workshop, and The World Is One Place: Native American Poets Visit the Middle East, an anthology she co-edited, are her newest books. Every Family Doubt, her fourth mystery novel featuring Cherokee campus police chief, Skeet Bannion, will appear December 19, 2017. Her three earlier Skeet novels—Every Hidden Fear, Every Broken Trust, and Every Last Secret—and her books of poetry—Skin Hunger and Heart's Migration—have received critical recognition and awards, such as St. Martin's Press/Malice Domestic Best First Novel, International Latino Book Award, Latina Book Club Best Book of 2014, Midwest Voices & Visions, Elvira Cordero Cisneros Award, Thorpe Menn Award, and Ragdale and Macondo fellowships. Her short story, “The Good Neighbor,” published in the anthology, Kansas City Noir, has been optioned for film.

Rodriguez is past chair of the AWP Indigenous Writer’s Caucus, past president of Border Crimes chapter of Sisters in Crime, founding board member of Latino Writers Collective and The Writers Place, and a member of International Thriller Writers, Wordcraft Circle of Native American Writers and Storytellers, and Kansas City Cherokee Community. Visit her at http://lindarodriguezwrites.blogspot.com