Gardens are a means of time travel. You only need to be close enough to a garden to smell what’s blooming to know this is so. The scent of lilacs, wafting on a spring breeze, transports me to early childhood. Mom and Dad had planted a row of lilacs and other flowering bushes in our back yard, and my friends and I used to play in the spaces between them. Mom let us take throw rugs outside to put on the grass, and we would play house, but mostly what we played was neighborhood, with a dwelling between each two bushes. And, in the spring, lilacs perfumed our neighborhood of make-believe, sunshine, and shade.
The heady scent of peonies takes me back to the same period of time, and to more than one place. Mom planted a peony garden the entire length of the garage. And, while we approached the blossoms with a cautious eye out for ants, approach them we did. I used to bury my face in the flowers, surrounding myself with their sweetness. Mom’s father was a gardener extraordinaire, and he grew peonies as well. I loved them in his garden, too. It seemed to me, as a tot, that Grandpa’s flowers were bigger than I was: peonies bigger than my head, gladiolus taller than me. His was a garden of wonder, bed after bed after bed, more flowers than grass.
He had a potting room down a long passageway in his garage. It smelled of earth and wood and drawers full of bulbs. Getting invited to go to the potting room with Grandpa was like being invited to share secrets, to glimpse the master’s workshop. The merest whiff of flower bulbs snaps me back to Grandpa’s inner sanctum.
The smell of tulips, even the sight of tulips, takes me to when I was in elementary school. Mom grew tulips in such profusion that she would send us off to school with tulip bouquets to present to our teachers. The whole process–choosing colors, wrapping the stems in waxed paper, the placing of the flowers in our arms, and handing the glorious bunches to our teachers—made us feel very special indeed. Our teachers liked the flowers, too, making a fuss over how pretty they were, bustling about to find a vase, and telling us to be sure to tell our mother thank you from them. The scent of tulips transports me to walking to Stone School with a fragrant bundle of flowers to give to the teacher.
The plants we grow in our gardens connect us with gardeners who came before us. Mom’s lilacs came from cuttings from her father’s garden. She took cuttings of those gifted lilacs when she and Dad moved the family to another house, and she planted them in our new home. She did that each time she and Dad moved. My sister has lilacs descended from Mom’s, and hence Grandpa’s, growing in her yard Up North. These plantings, these gifts of love that we tend and keep, don’t so much transport us to another time and place as keep our loved ones near us. Honoring in our gardens what they honored in theirs keeps the time portal open, and brings our dear ones to us. As long as we have these pieces of their lives, we still have them in ours.
I established a new garden bed last summer. We had lost a mature white pine, and the shade-loving plants that had grown happily beneath it had become unhappy. They got moved to another shady spot, and thrive there now under the same regime of benign neglect they previously enjoyed. I put long hours and hard work into preparing their old location for its new life as a sun garden. Then came the fun part: choosing new plants.
One plant in particular had to make the cut: beebalm, bergamot, monarda. Many plants grew in Mom’s last garden, and she knew all of their names. The name she played with, though, was beebalm, bergamot, monarda. It’s all the same plant. It just has three wonderful names, and she used all of them each time she mentioned it. I wanted to plant some, to open a portal to Mom.
Just this week, our beebalm, bergamot, monarda started to bloom. My husband reported seeing a hummingbird going positively nuts over it, whizzing from flower to flower to flower for as long as my husband and the dog were willing to stand watching it in the hot sun. Seeking a more sheltered vantage point, I found that if I stand just to the right of one of the living room windows and peer behind the curtain, I can see the sun garden from indoors. When I tried this the first time, I startled a hummingbird from its appointed rounds.
“Oh!” I said, my voice a good octave higher than normal. “There was a hummingbird!” Right there in the beebalm, bergamot, monarda. I can’t help wondering if Mom saw it, too. Or sent it. The portal was open, and love shone through. Such is the nature of garden time travel.
18 June 2021