by Mary Ann Mcgivern

Created on: August 29, 2010   Last Updated: September 08, 2010

My foster sons, Paul and Eli, were 12 and 14 when they came. They chose me, so making a family was not difficult. But I never made them garden. I garden for the joy of it, learned as an adult. It was one thing to require them to wash windows or vacuum the living room, family chores; quite another to demand that they weed or thin the carrots., labors of love, not obligation.

I did ask them every year to cull the new fruit on our eight trees, a mini orchard. I can't bear to remove perfectly good small pears or apples so that we get just enough big juicy ones. So I set the boys to running through the trees, shaking them and forcing fruit drop. It’s a task they enjoyed.

They also liked to bring in food for supper – dig up an onion, pick tomatoes, break off the asparagus.  Then they would ask about the garlic tops, and smell the sage and oregano. But they weren't keen on the taste of the herbs and they didn't like flowers in their salad. I did hear Paul once telling a friend that the marigolds at the edge of the yard protected us all from mosquitoes.

When Eli got married years ago in May, I offered his fiancee baskets of roses for the wedding, as many as she wanted. Somewhere around 1985 a Jackson and Perkins ad on the back of Parade Magazine offered 50 Simplicity bush roses for $100, my first serious garden investment. Ten years later I could offer with confidence to do the flowers for the wedding. The mother of the bride was nervous about the arrangement and astounded when Paul and I carried half a dozen big baskets of roses into the church, plus baskets for the bridesmaids, petals for the flower girl, and a small basket of rosebuds, designed in consultation with the bride, for her to carry in lieu of a bouquet

Neither of my sons grew up to be gardeners. Eli is a plumber and Paul is a shop laborer. But they talk about my garden as if they had expert knowledge. Paul was telling his wife they should plant a fruit tree. She rolled her eyes and I laughed. The apricot has the most beautiful flowers in the spring, I said. Get a dwarf self-pollinator and it will take care of itself. Then my granddaughter wanted to know what a self-pollinator is.  That's another story.

I've moved and another family has my garden. They've put in a curving stone path and cut some of the trees. But the blackberries and asparagus still thrive. And the roses are always in full bloom by Mother's Day.

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