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POSTSCRIPT
postscript MAY/JUNE 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
Spring has sprung/the grass has riz/ I wonder where my trowel is. Guess I’ll have to clean out the garage. Anyway, this seems a good month 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 handing on the vine until it trotted and fell off.
And that was about it 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 or 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 rhododendron, 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 magnificent 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 on her deathbed, his mother told Jack 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 recycling the Christmas tree, I’ve got it nailed. Or rather, Rosie, Blackie, Rufus and Madeline do. “Why take it to Tod’s Point?” asked daughter Audrey, who lives in Weston. “I can feed it to my goats! They’d love it!”
Goats. The ultimate recyclers. What do I know?
