Grandmother's Garden

Being trapped indoors by severe winter weather has presented opportunities to dig through old boxes looking for who knows what. These old photos brought back pleasant memories.  My maternal grandmother and her father were tremendously influential in establishing my interest in flowering plants.  For most of my youth, grandma lived in a second floor apartment and only had flower boxes on the covered porch railing that spanned the front of the building.  She was forever cutting slips, as she called them, and placing them in glasses filled with water.  If roots formed, she had  new plants to replace the old worn out ones in the flower boxes.  In the late 1950's she moved to a proper house and replaced the back lawn with an impressive garden.  Looking back in light of my later experiences with grass next to planting beds, I must wonder just how she kept the grass out of the flowers.

These photos are identified as having been taken in 1958.  This one shows a fourteen year old me bringing a box of so far unidentified wild ferns to my grandmother for her new garden.  We are standing at field's edge close to the house that my father had built in Newfield, N.Y.  The property line follows a stream located deep in the woods at the far edge of the field.  These plants were dug from the woods for her garden.

Grandmother's house is visible in the background.  Little did I know then that my life was about to change.  My father worked for the Railway Express Agency in Ithaca.  Railway Express was a package delivery service much like UPS is now.  Passenger trains were used to move parcels.  When the Lehigh Valley Railroad discontinued their passenger service, my father's job also disappeared.  We left eighteen rural acres and moved into a main street third floor apartment in Nyack.  Early on as an adult, I found a secluded village house with enough land for a garden.  Retirement to thirty-six rural acres took me back to a life style similar to what I had known as a kid.  Ranging over the presently owned land has to a degree returned me to a skinnier more healthy self.

It seems apparent that the nearly twenty-five years lived here at Stone Wall Garden has returned a youthful sparkle to my eyes and  the return of an occasional smile.