Ages ago, it seems, I signed up for You Grow Girl’s Garden Writing Prompts, provided by site owner Gayla Trail. I got busy and failed to participate. But now, I want to begin.

The first prompt encouraged garden writers to describe their first plant … and I find that I cannot remember my first plant. But I do have plant memories galore from childhood:

• My mom was not passionate about gardening, but she did grow quite a few houseplants. She grew philodendron in water, never putting them in dirt at all. Their long vines trailed across the fireplace mantle and draped down over the brick fireplace, tracing a graceful memory for me.
• Purple hyacinths bloomed along the front sidewalk in spring. I often lay down beside them so that I could inhale their sweetness from the ground level.
• My father had a vegetable garden for years, and I remember him in his sweat-soaked sleeveless undershirt and work pants tending to and watering the garden. What I remember most, from these frugal days, was that he softened the water stream he was using to water the plants, not with a sprinkler, but by sticking the hosepipe  into an empty can lying on its side at one end of a garden row.  From it, the water ran in a broader, gentler stream.
• From that garden, my mom would pick ears of sweet corn. Then she would sit down on the edge of the compost pile to shuck them, after which she took them inside, and dropped them into a pot of boiling water. That was probably the sweetest sweet corn I ever ate.

All my grandparents were farmers. A visit meant seeing rows of sweet corn waving in the breeze, green beans crawling up poles, and  people  picking strawberries; or listening to my aunts chatter as they shelled peas on the porch and to the scary crescendo of the pressure cooker signaling food being put up for the winter. ... Read More