by Hans-Gustav Schwartz

Created on: August 15, 2008   Last Updated: September 21, 2008

My dad had a green thumb. There was no doubt about it. Don't know where he got it from. I'm sure it had something to do with the long line of German farmers that are my family's ancestors. Dad was a firefighter by trade, but when he was not protecting the property and lives of the residents of Long Beach, California, dad was a farmer.

Growing up, we always had the nicest yard on the block. Dad would spend his time off carefully manicuring the front and back yard, always making sure that mom had a constant supply of cut flowers. In late spring we'd have gladiolus, narcissus, daffodils and rununculus. In the summer we'd have marigolds, asters, chrysanthemums and lord knows what else. The neighbors always commented on dad's flowerbeds and vegetable gardens. They were always so well kept. The vegetable garden rows were straight and weeded and supplied our family with a number of treats.

But dad's favorite, I think, were his roses. He and my aunt used to sit and compare notes on how to take care of their beloved roses. My aunt always bragged about her tree rose that had been grafted so that it bore blooms of different colors. She'd laugh as she would tell the story, often times repeated, of how someone driving by the house would stop dead in the road and just stare at that tree rose with the two different colored roses on it.

Those were the halcyon days of my youth. And in that time, as is the way of life, things changed. There came a day when our family moved from my childhood home and we went to live in an old house in another part of the city.

It was an old house built in the 1920's. It was a decaying two storied Spanish stucco house with just two bedrooms. Mom and dad got one of the bedrooms and my younger sister got the other. Out back there was an old garage that dad converted into my bedroom. It was pretty cool. I was a high schooler then and it was nice to have my own place. Behind my room the lot stretched back another two hundred feet or more. The old couple who had lived there had grown too old to care for the place and behind my room and to the property line was a tangle of weeds and ancient overgrown shrubs.

We moved in and dad went straight away to work. In a couple weeks the weeds had been removed and quite a few of the old shrubs were relegated to the trash with the smaller stuff being thrown into the compost pile. The back yard was starting to take shape.

Dad fed and watered the old orange trees and within weeks they seemed to spring back to life. In

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