Saying goodbye to my mother in her hospital bed was both a sadness and a release for me. My entry into this world occurred during the second half of her life. She had just turned forty and had wanted to go back to school. Instead, she had brought another child into this world and the result was that she had to postpone her degree for a few more years.

My memory are few at this point but I am told that it was during my early years - years when my mother was caught between dutiful motherhood and the longing for freedom during the turbulent sixties - that mother began to garden and develop a love for all things green that remained with her during the years that I knew her.

Part of her interest in learning about plants and roses in particular stemmed from the fact that my dad was a Farm Adviser. Everyone she knew was farming and cultivating plants for various purposes ranging from grapes for wineries to apricots to be dried in fruit sheds. Still, her interest extended further than simply growing plants to eat.

You see - her dream of college centered on a fascination with teaching and art that sprang up during her childhood. Flowers were meant to be drawn and the best way to learn to draw flowers was to grow them and experience that growth as they unfolded and shared their life with our human world of touch, sight, smell and sound. Soft petals perfectly formed with a compelling scent grown amidst buzzing bees. The point where these two worlds touched - plant and human - was the realm of art that my mother loved to explore.

In many ways, my mother was not a gentle person but rather one that grew up during the Great Depression with a father who wanted boys rather than girls and a mother who had to live with her own failure at not producing sons. Granddad was a carpenter and mother was expected to help him because she was the eldest of four daughters.

She told me that she learned about tools and the hard labor of sawing at an early age while her sisters got to play. The need for her to work kept her out of school and led to a struggle with stuttering due to her lack of practice with reading and language skills at home. Again, the harshness of these realities repeated in oft told tales while plucking weeds from the ground by her side drove her desire to go to school and become a teacher.

Gardening, therefore, grew out of her need to improve her self but she quickly developed a connection with plants that she often lacked with people. My

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