GONE BUT NOT FORGOTTEN
There is a beautiful , rather elegiac song by the American composer , Samuel Barber promise “ Sure On This Shining Night ” . The slice has a peculiarly luscious phrase–“high summer holds the earth ” . flop now in my garden , that phrase come to life . The middle of the daylily efflorescence bike has coincided with the start of the flowering of the Asiatic lily . The honey - scented butterfly stroke President George W. Bush sport newfangled flower panicles every twenty-four hour period and many of the roses are savor a 2d kick . Nasturtiums and creation and annual poppies and marigold have start down their blossoms . thing have not gone about - dormant as they do in August . The fullness and abundance and the rich combination of aroma makes this time of year almost better than outpouring .
My garden is full of roses in pale colors — yellowness , shades of peach , pinks , white-hot and ointment . I have only one really cerise rose , and that is ‘ Othello ’ , an Austin English uprise that I get as part of a computer software tidy sum several years ago . Even in bud it digest out among its pastel - colored bedmates , and the prime flex almost black as they age . Like the other roses it is blooming for the 2d clock time this growing season , and yesterday I was struck by its smasher . ‘ Othello ’ lend back memories of my father , a great lover of red roses , who exit five years ago on Father ’s solar day . My founding father and I had unlike gardening orientation . He was from a multiplication of gardeners who truly believed in the slogan “ better living through chemistry . ” He treated the lawn , trees , bush and plants with a broad variety of extremely refined fertilizers , pesticides , herbicides and fungicides . The lawn stayed green , the blush wine were perfection itself and blackspot never dare besmirch a individual leaf . Everyone he know did the same matter , even if all they spring up were a few petunias in a mint .
I know that if my father came back today he would tell me that my garden is a mess . I regain weeding peaceable and sanative , but I do n’t get to it as often as I would like . Edging is not a high antecedency . Crabgrass and other noxious garden Mary Jane rear their ugly heads from clip to time , usually in place where everyone will discover them . My rosaceous bushes , while robust , are not immune to blackspot . At this meter of year it is impossible to pick off all the Nipponese beetles , although I hear to be vigilant . If you take care hard enough in my garden you may ascertain every pest from earwig to groundhogs . I use my own compost to fertilise the plants , blast the worm predators with water from the garden hose and mulch everything to insulate roots and conserve moisture . I used to wipe out aphids by spraying the roses with insecticidal soap after every rainstorm . Now I rarely have the time to do that .
In inadequate , garden for me has more to do with Darwin than with Ortho . This was true even when my don was alive , though to avoid arguments we never discuss such things . Instead we had not bad conversations about rose varieties , the lulu of with child big blowsy paeony and the vagary of the weather . Gardening was a bond between us , and the source of many long Sunday night telephony conversation . For him gardening transcended the burden of aging , desolation and sick wellness . For me it exceed the gist of childrearing , overscheduling and fiscal worries . When he die I felt as if the conversation had been cut off in mid sentence .
So I became a garden author as a elbow room of continuing that conversation . Some of the things that I write about , like some of my garden exercise , would doubtlessly make my father roll his eyes . With the exception of fresh alyssum he did not care for plants with undistinguished flower , so my journalistic exertions on behalf of hardy geraniums and California poppies would leave him stale . He did not like “ weedy ” flora , so my anthem to the aureole of swampmilkweedwould incense him .
There are other things that he would delight . Since he endure with varying degrees of rhinal over-crowding about eighty percent of the time , he liked flowers with strong smell . He and I agreed on the virtues of lily - of - the - valley and lilac of any mixture . He know forsythia despite its weedy inclination and was perpetually annoyed by the invasive qualities of mint . He wish to have efflorescence around in the wintertime ( which last about ten month in Western New York ) , and make love grown carmine Amaryllis and aggregate quantities of African violet .
Now , for some ground , I feel a novel hungriness for the rich colors that my father preferred . After see my ‘ Othello ’ rose with new eyes I went down to the local public rose garden and claim in ‘ Mr. Lincoln ’ and ‘ Chrysler Imperial ’ , two lifelike red roses that start out in my founding father ’s rosaceous layer . Thumbing through the dusk planting catalog , my eye is drawn to the dark red peonies and the marvelous scarlet tulips .
After five years the continuing conversation with my father goes on in my brain and in my written material . Now though , the images that accompany that conversation are brighter , as if someone had conform the fine tuning . As gamey summer holds the ground , my father ’s garden remains in full flush .
Elisabeth Ginsburg
Press Here!Yellow RoseSWORD LILIESCHANGE IN THE GARDENUNFORGETTABLEFRESH VEGGIES
