A GARDEN OF BRILLIANT SPRING

Years ago I used to be an avid horticulturalist. But I haven't been that way in a long time.
It isn't that coming back to San Francisco has changed anything.
I'm still as fond of flowers as I always have been - you can take the bad-tempered grouch out of Holland, but you can't take Holland out of the bad-tempered grouch.

Now I have a choice.

That wasn't always the case.

It was my mother, she made me do it.


The house where we lived in Valkenswaard had a huge garden, scarcely visible beyond the courtyard in summer because of bushes and an ancient apple-tree. Turning what had been a wilderness into a paradise was my mother's project. For several years, every week in summer and autumn she and I would buy plants at the Thursday street market, eventually transforming the garden into a panoply of colour and intense viridian.

My mother had lumbago and rheumatism.

Care to guess who did most of the work?


In autumn we would haul crates of bulbs home from the market, which I would then spend hours sticking in the ground.
This was after I had already planted shrubs, trimmed branches, mowed the lawn, throughout spring and summer......

Gardening was very therapeutic for my mother. She really did enjoy her plants.

The hours of hard labour paid off in Spring, when the bulbs I had planted would produce glowing flame for two whole months, before even the shrubs yielded their blooms, followed by the deepest greens of a warm wet summer.
From April to October, the garden was glorious to the eye. By the end of summer the forsythia formed forest glades, rhododendron and azalea filled the darker areas with blurs of harlot lipstick hue.

I've always loved gardens. Still do.
Not entirely enthusiastic about the work involved, though.

For me the nicest of all the plants was the gigantic apple tree at the end of the courtyard.
It required absolutely no work (!), and repaid that lack of effort handsomely, sending pale petals showering down at each breeze that formed dense drifts across the paving stones and providing our cats with stuff to chase and leap at. The clouds of white blossom eventually gave way to leafy shade in June.

My mother wasn't very appreciative of the apple tree, or of the cherry tree beyond the stables. She thought both of them were show-offs, spreading their charm without needing effort.
The crocuses and tulips, daffodils and tiny pale dwarf narcissuses, these were her favourites.

The last autumn of her life, we really did the garden proud. I never planted so many tulips and crocuses as I did that year. She supervised the effort, and we would often go back to the market for more crates of bulbs.
She spent the final three months of her life in the hospital, passing away in Spring - she never saw them bloom.
But she was happy when we told her how beautiful her garden looked.




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