FOUNDER’S LETTER

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MARCH 2022 / DONNA MOFFLY

I was terribly proud of my basil until I took it to the office and was told it was mint. OF GREENERY AND GROWING THINGS

It’s spring (almost), when little green things start springing from the ground. And since this is our landscaping issue, it seems a good time to reflect on my earthly adventures.

As a city child in Cleveland, I loved visiting family friends who lived in the country— an area called Daisy Hill, except oddly their specialty was daffodils. My brothers and I were allowed to pick armloads of them.

During the war, we also had a communal Victory Garden behind our apartment building where I managed to outdo my archrival Antoinette by growing an eggplant much bigger than hers. I left it proudly hanging on the vine until it rotted and fell off.

And that was about it in for gardening, until I married Jack. His mother, Audrey (later “Granny”), was an expert, her gardens in Philadelphia gracing the pages of national magazines. She was also a traveler and a smuggler. If there were cedars of Lebanon on her property, you can bet they were the real thing brought back as seedlings in little baggies in the toes of her shoes. “What do you do when customs asks if you have any flora and fauna?” I once asked her. “Do you lie?” “Oh, no, Dearie,” she huffed. “I never lie. I just don’t hear.” That part was God’s truth. She was deaf as a post.

Granny taught us a lot about cultivation. For instance, you can take a lower branch of a rhodo, push it into the earth with a rock on top, and next year you’ll have a whole new bush. She rented her cottage to newlyweds, accepting payment in the form of (heavily supervised) garden work. She had a potting shed by a babbling brook where our kids loved to pick watercress for salads. (They usually fell in.)

And Granny had magificent trees—like the copper beach with a swing in the front yard and handsome pines in back. When Jack’s father died, she asked my sister-in-law and me to cut pine boughs for over his coffin in church. So out we went with our clippers, cutting away until I finally turned to Sally and said: “Do you think we have enough?” “I don’t know,” she responded. “Lie down.”

Years later, with Jack holding her hand on her deathbed, his mother would tell him she was worried about who was going to get her boxwood.

Well, I tried. I was terribly proud of my basil until I took a bunch to the office and was told it was mint. It just tasted like basil because it had grown next to so much of it. I read that plastic keeps down weeds, so I threw a shiny black tarp on the ground, punched holes in it for squash seeds and ended up with zillions of slugs underneath and squash vines that blackened inch by inch, finally turning the yellow blossoms into yuck. Jack and I planted 100 bulbs Granny sent us for Christmas, and only ten tulips came up. But I was quite successful at transplanting pachysandra from our front yard to other spots. Plus, I could spy on the new people moving in across the street.

Jack did have a touch of his mother in him, though. He loved orchids and babied them for years—complete with a tiny humidifier—in the bay window of our dining room. Now I’m struggling to keep them alive.

As for getting rid of the Christmas tree— the latest greenery in the house—I’ve got it nailed. Or rather, Rosie, Blackie, Rufus and Madeline do. “Why take it to Tod’s Point?” daughter Audrey asked me. “I can feed it to my goats! They’d love it!” “You’re kidding,” I said in disbelief. “They’d eat that thing?” “Down to the last needle,” she replied. “It may take them a few months, but they will.” The ultimate recyclers. Whaddo I know? G