Last year I hired a happy limb-walker to remove a towering spruce tree that had become a danger to persons and property. This year the root-bound place where it stood is covered with white stones and ringed by trellised sweet peas. Of all the floral scents nature offers, the aroma of sweet peas pleases me most. Besides delighting my sense of smell, it arouses an amorphous cloud of memories of gardens of other years. It flashes across the screen behind my eyes so quickly that nothing is specific, but it brings with it the emotions which, as a man and a boy, I have felt in 80 seasons in the garden
Sometimes, I can make the memory-stream into a slow motion replay. I see again my grandfather's well-mannered garden. I laugh when a crow joins him as he sits on a stool with his garden hose. He and the crow have an animated conversation in a language. I can't understand. It is 1934 and I am seven years old. I know the tame crow belongs to the men who are tearing down the railway roundhouse, but I am not aware of the melancholy which hangs like a shroud over the village. The railway payroll will be gone.
The village survives. Grandfather continues to grow prodigious quantities of peas. He shells some with special care so that the pods are not damaged. I use pieces of tooth picks to spread the pods into little green canoes which I sail in the smallest rainwater barrel.
The village is still in its doldrums when I become old enough to be a gardener. When the last crystallized snow, stained by the ashes of coal and wood stoves, retreats into the caragana hedges, it is my task to dig (with a fork) and rake the garden plot. My father expects what I plant to be more orderly and useful than my mother's haphazard gardens. She would rather look at flowers than eat vegetables.
Then the war is over and the soldiers have returned, but my brother and his war bride have left the village to live in England. On a grey day in late summer I stand beside their empty house staring at the sodden, unkempt garden. For years, it had been understood that he would stay in the village and I would go adventuring in the larger world. Now I will remain in the village. My expectations must change. I need a new dream.
In another year, before gardens are made ready to take new seed, death comes, like a double trip-hammer blow, to the grandmothers of our children. My wife's mother has filled her house with sturdy seedlings. I stand beside our new house, calculating where the little orphan plants should be set out. I have no heart for it. I am numb, cold and joyless. Everything my wife's mother planted will perish in the frost. She will never have gifts for us again.
The winter of 2011-12 trapped the garden's perennials under layers of ice. Some of them perished. Cold soil has no welcome for new seeds. When growth comes at last, the garden is battered by howling winds, rain and hail. Today, I marvel at the survivors. The perennials are taller than they ever were before and more laden with colourful blossoms.
They are doing as they must. In a desperate spurt of growth, they are passing on the life patterns of their ancestors.
Old gardeners also take the blessings they have been given and pass them on.
