by Eileen Brodie

Created on: August 28, 2008   Last Updated: September 21, 2008

Have you ever harvested a peanut butter sandwich from an ivy hedge? My mother has. There's little that she has not seen, done, or endured when it comes to creating a garden.

Living in locations as diverse as Hawaii, California, or the Southwestern desert, a large part of her life has been devoted to cultivating a space outdoors. Her children knew that to find mom after school, you had to look in the garden. (My earliest baby picture was taken there; I was playing in pea gravel while mom weeded and planted.) Mom's desire to be in a garden must be described as a happy obsession. Grand garden schemes took shape over time, everywhere we lived.

That ivy hedge in Berkeley, California, was as tall as the first story of our house. Wider than a car, it ran along the entire property and hid our yard from the street. When I rode my brother's too-big bicycle, I used the hedge to do a controlled landing; my feet couldn't reach the ground. Mom couldn't see me do this from the kitchen window, so I got away with it. One summer, Mom and Dad did some hedge trimming. After some time, they discovered a curious cache. Deep in the bowels of the hedge were dozens of lunch sacks. These turned out to be unwanted lunches from our neighbor's teenage son. For some time he had been stuffing his lunch into the ivy before heading off to school. I don't know if my parents revealed this to his parents, it's more likely they kept Martin's secret. (Sorry, Martin, everybody knows about it now!)

One year, mom built a decent-sized pond out of stones. We'd help when we were home from school, but mostly she plugged away on her own at her pet project. Dad contributed by supplying stones salvaged from San Francisco streets being torn up near the waterfront. These had been ballast in ships arriving in San Francisco during the city's storied past. Not being a fan of wheelbarrows or cement mixers, (and probably pregnant with my youngest brother at the time) mom's method involved mixing mortar, one coffee can at a time. I can still remember the large blue can, mom's hands gooey with mortar, and three more stones set in the pond wall. In the end, she got things done, however slow her method. Filling that pond with water was a well-earned triumph. We commenced jumping into the pond from the top of the nearby workshed. Not exactly the zen-like scene mom had pictured while constructing it, I'm sure. Some time later, the pond was used to extinguish a burning mattress that dad had thrown from the second story

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