I am just planting this post in the Hive Garden very late in the week in response to the QOTW - I've been meaning to get around to it but I've been busy with stuff. You know, planting garlic, surfing, staring into infinite blue autumnal skies and all. One of the questions, at least in part, was 'do you have family that also love gardening?', so I thought I'd share this trip to a nursery with my Mum. I've been really pleased to see people using the #hivegardenqotw prompts as a starting point for thier own writing - thanks to everyone that have been sharing their stories! The Easter one should be out today, a day early on Good Friday.
Mum's just managing to get out and about now six months after Dad's shuffling to a garden beyond the veil, and it's her beautiful garden that gives her a bit of focus.
They've always had a beautiful garden, particularly their natives, and whilst they never have, I've always suggested they have an open garden. It's a lot - an acre - which is hard for a 75 year old woman to maintain, but Dad got a bit of a compensation pay out from dying of asbestos lung, so she can afford to get people in to trim trees and do anything she needs so she can do the smaller stuff.
As we entered the nursery on the road to Torquay, I spied this gorgeous salvia. I have a good mind to go back and get it. I'm not really a salvia person but this almost made me want to be.
As Mum said, garden is a bit of a creative outlet, something she can nurture. I'm proud of her for pointedly finding something she can live for. I found it interesting that both Mum and I feel plants, running our hands along the featherly leaves or spikes of unusual leaves. Had I mimicked her at some point? Like mother, like daughter?
We spend a little bit of time in front of the kangaroo paws. She sitll hasn't decided how she'll plant out the bed that's just been finally removed of flax - such big, pain in the ass plants, but paws will definitely feature. I don't like them so much - the flowers, yes, but they can really itch when you get in there to remove the flowers and tidy them up at the end of season. Still, the gold ones tempted me - perhaps I'll go and put a few in pots?
I ended up buying two plants - one shorter banksia that has a golden flower, and a taller grevillea, for the birds. I'm a big, big believer in planting for birds and bees. Last week on the community pages on Facebook people were saying how the flies were at plague levels in town and we haven't had hardly any. Summer is usually about flies so it really puzzled me. I think it's because we have so many birds!
As for other family members and gardening, well, here's Jamie up an apple tree. He does most of the hard labour - pruning and digging and weeding really - whilst I do the planning and thinking about how it all works together, and planting vegetables and looking after the compost. I don't think I'd have a garden this size if I didn't have a husband to do the hard stuff - because unlike Mum, I can't afford to pay a gardener.
I was thinking about my parents gardening over the years and ended up looking through my photos for Mum and Dad in the garden. I found one of them in the '80s, and one about a month before he died. He looks so old here - as if time had just caught up with him. He'd hate me sharing this photo, but he's not around to see it anyway. He was buried in that flannel shirt - he loved it. It was super comfy and the only thing Mum could get on him on that last day when he fell and had to be helped into bed, never to get up again. There's a lot of photos of him in that shirt.
Of course, this post has made me cry a little, so I am going to walk around the garden and see if I can find some jobs for Jamie to do and plant some snow peas. Sometimes a garden is a good distraction.
With Love,
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