Lessons in a summer garden

The Boston Herald

BEVERLY BECKHAM

It must be a byproduct of age. It must develop like a taste for lobster or pate, or like gray hair, slowly, but inevitably. How else to explain it? When I was young I used to hate working in a garden; now I'm old and I love it. Why?

When I was a child, you couldn't lure me outdoors. My mother tried. She bought me a package of bachelor button seeds and a planter at the five-and-ten and brought in from outdoors a pail full of loam and said, "Here, now you can grow your own garden." She must have believed that once I saw life spring forth from seeds I had personally buried in dirt I would be awed and treasure all life that emerged from the ground.

But it didn't work that way. I didn't have any interest in the seeds. I didn't want to plant them. I didn't want to dirty my hands and take care of things that would eventually have to be transplanted in soil in which worms and earwigs lived. All my mother's talk about the miracle of life meant nothing to me.

But it meant everything to her. She worked all day, came home, cooked dinner, did the dishes, then the laundry, then changed into my father's old shirt and pants and, weather permitting, headed out to her garden. In early spring when it was so cold you could still see your breath and dark came early, she would be out there, flashlight in hand, "preparing the soil," she used to say. "Why don't you help me?" she'd ask and I'd recoil and insist I had homework to do. I shied away from my mother's "rock garden" but she couldn't get enough of it.

The name was a euphemism, really. The builder had left a boulder the size of Rhode Island in our backyard. All the time our house was being built we believed the mound was loam because that's what the builder covered it with, and that's what he wanted us to believe. But when the house was done and the mound was still there, it was obvious we'd been duped.

"You mean you didn't notice that thing before?" he actually said. "How could you not? It was right in front of your eyes. I never intended for you to think it was loam. What kind of a man do you think I am?"

My mother told him exactly what kind of a man she thought he was. I had to leave the room, but I heard her through closed doors. Eventually though, she accepted the situation because there was nothing else she could do. The house was built. The rock was there. What's done was done. So she restructured her thinking and decided to view the rock not as an eyesore, but as a focal point. She dug a wide circle around it, had my father clear the brush and then she created a garden.

I have to admit it looked pretty with its daffodils in the spring and its daisies in the summer and the roses, which bloomed all summer long. I liked the colors that assaulted me when I stood in the kitchen and glanced out the window, and I liked the smells that drifted in on the breeze. I never thought the garden was worth my mother's effort, though. I used to watch her bent over pulling weeds, which grew during the day while she was off selling hats. I used to wonder how she knew the difference between the green that was weed and the green that was flower. Who told her which blossoms thrived in the sun and which preferred the shade? We'd had only cut flowers in the city. She was new to life in the suburbs and yet she was mastering it.

I was fascinated by this skill, by her alchemy with seed and soil, and it was this that was the mystery, not the life that burst from the ground. "Someday, when you have your own garden, you'll understand why I love it," she used to tell me. I shook my head and said never. I'll never understand. I'll never like getting dirt under my fingernails. I'll never like working all day, then changing my clothes and working at night.

My mother must be somewhere smiling right now, for I've just come in from the garden. My hands are dirty and I'm tired, but it's a happy tired. Under last fall's leaves I found the tulips I planted three years ago and they've multiplied and are growing in bunches. The crocuses I thought wouldn't survive are sturdy and in full bloom. The hyacinth, trampled by the dog, are alive. I give so little time to my garden, and yet it thrives. It's not beautiful. It's not like my mother's. I am not as dedicated as she was, or as artistic, or as in love with the work.

But I love the results. I love how with so little effort, life endures. I love the promise of the garden, most dramatic in spring, that life is eternal. And I love feeling what my mother felt, and finding comfort in the earth.