Healing Gardens

My mothers parents were both raised on farms. My grandmothers parents never owned their own farm and I think that they did a sort of share cropping, growing cotton in West Texas. My grandmothers grandfather was also a farmer and he grew watermelons, also in Texas. There is a picture of him standing on a huge watermelon and my grandmother used to tell me how wonderful his melons tasted in the heat of summer after cooling under the front porch.

My grandfathers family owned their farm in Texas. They grew all of their food and I am sure they also grew cotton. My great-grandmother on this side was a native American, her name was Sea-Belle.

Both of my mothers parents left the farm and fled to the city in the 1920’s. Neither of them had any desire to work the land and they believed they would have a better quality of life. I am sure making more money played into their decision. But, when my mother was born in 1930, at the beginning of the depression it was the farms they left and the farm work they shunned that kept them fed.

Mother had many stories of the farms her grandparents lived on. She spent every summer going from one grandparent’s house to the other, while her parents worked in the city.

She talked about her experiences during those years, and no matter where we lived we always had plants and well kept yards.

She talked about the abundance and the good tasting foods. And because her family had access to food during the depression, her stories are very different from the stories my father had.

All of their lives, my mother and my grandmother would compare the food they grew up with to the vastly different foods bought in the supermarket, each one saying, “food just doesn’t taste like it used to”.

My father’s parents, unlike my mother’s family, were several generations removed from the type of farms my mother’s parents maintained. My grandmother’s family had long ago become storeowners and they grew food for their own use.

During the depression years, my father’s family ended up living in a chicken coop at the farm of my dad’s grandmother. From what I understand many people from the family let the cities during the depression to return to my great-great grandmother’s farm where they were desperately poor but at least could eat.

My dad’s mother eventually moved to the New Mexico desert when my grandfather took a job with El Paso Natural Gas Company and they lived 70 miles from the nearest town. The station they lived on became an oasis where they grew most of their own food. There water source held trout and they got their milk and meat from the animals they raised. About 15 families lived at the “station” as it was called. I remember going to visit them and suddenly out of the desert, this beautiful green oasis seemed to appear like a mirage.

The station was called Number 7, and my grandmother grew absolutely everything! It was filled with flowers, fruits, and vegetables. She also raised parakeets in an Avery that was the center of her garden. She grew peaches that were so big it took both hands to hold them!

When she and my grandfather retired to Albuquerque, she continued her gardening. Her back yard was not a big yard, looking back, it was probably an average size yard, but it was so full of flowers, fruits and vegetables that upon entering it you felt you were in an enormous garden with everything you could possibly need growing there! And I am amazed that from this small area she literally filled her cupboards with canned goods.

My family left Texas when I was five, and we ended up in Southern California. When we first moved, there everywhere you looked there were fields and orchards full of growing things. My parents never did grow fruits and vegetables but our yard was always beautiful, and very cultivated. Fitting for a California suburb.

When I was a little girl, I wanted to be a writer and a farmer. Now that I am growing older and after doing many different things, what I really want to do is write and farm. I have the advantage of being able to see the lives lived by those who came before me. Those that lived close to the land lived longer, healthier lives than those who did not. Also, the people who stayed on the farms seemed to be happier than more contented with life than the ones who left.

My husband and I left California 16 years ago. We slowing comeing full circle back to the place our grandparents left. We have full time jobs like our parents did, but we are gradually returning to growing more of our own food and living at a slower pace than our parents and grandparents did after leaving the farms.

Reflections: Week 2

I have seen cutting gardens, where flowers are grown just to cut and bring into the house. I have one of these and so do many of my neighbors.

I have known vegetable gardens that look like stained glass in the summertime when the sun shines on them and the fruits and vegetables are wet from rain or an early morning watering.

In my front yard, I have a bird garden where I grow things just for the birds to eat and it is like having my own personal Avery.

There are rose gardens that I visit just to smell the roses, and although I have only grown one rose in my life, a pink sweetheart rose, every time I leave a rose garden, I am sure I will make growing roses my passion. There is a garden such as this in California but I can’t remember the name of it.

There are memory gardens, places that are created so you might pause and remember (there is one at Labor and Industries in Tumwater, planted to reflect and remember people).

In Lompoc California, there are seed gardens. Burpee Seed Company grows flowers so they will seed. My husband’s grandparents used to liven in a house in the middle of one of the fields.

There are rock gardens. There is a rock garden at a home of a friend. He collects rocks and places them in an area. When the rocks get wet, it looks like a treasure chest.

There are bulb gardens. These are the tulip and daffodil festivals we attend every year, like the one in Skagit Valley.

There are Lavender farms. I try to go to the lavender festival near Sequim and am always glad to see the mounds of lavender growing in the sand. The warm sun hitting the plants on a summer day always smells so clean and clear. And I am amazed at the amount of lavender produced and offered to the public for cutting. There seems to be no end to how much lavender that can be produced. However, I have never had a lot of luck with growing it where I live.

At the ocean, I see gardens when beach grass and driftwood settle in and the native plants grow around the sculpture of driftwood. And I also love the cottage gardens that are different everywhere you go. Beach gardens filled with hydrangeas, inpatients and ferns. English gardens filed with perennials and annuals.

My mother told me of a garden in Texas that belonged to old women. She grew nothing but peonies and made corsages out of them. Mother said that people would walk by her house and stand around just to smell the flowers.

Victory gardens were gardens during World War 2. The idea was for people to grow as much of their own food as possible because much of the food grown commercially was used to send overseas.

After reading chapter 2 in “Fields That Dream”, Gretchen, in the story Good Girl, mentions the movement away from the land and from-scratch meals. We have gone a long, long way from living off of or even close to the land. Maybe getting the Victory Gardens of World War II might be a way to bring people a little closer to the land.

Reflecting on the different types of gardens there are makes me even more aware of how our earth is a garden, and how we need to push forward to preserve what we still can.

Week 3