Lornet’s violets

When Mom—I call her Lornet—comes to visit, she’s envious that my “weeds” in the Pacific Northwest are ferns. “I love your ferns,” she says. “I weed whack them,” I say.

Lornet’s “weeds” are violets—one of my favorite flowers—deep blue woods violets that look particularly lovely peppering her particularly lovely hosta beds. I guess I didn’t realize she had such a profusion of violets because I don’t usually go home to Indiana in early spring. But Easter morning she had some heart arrhythmia, so I got on a plane.

After Mom was released from the hospital—during that odd couple of days when the doctors have assured you that you’re fine and kicked you out but you still feel like a patient—we did the only logical thing and took a walk in her garden. The weather was exactly as I’d left it in Seattle: cold, gloomy, rainy. Hardly a lovely day for a stroll, but it somehow added to the intimacy of seeing her garden waking up in its spring pajamas rather than dressed to the nines in late summer.

Lornet’s garden is much different than mine. It’s nicely established and planted tight and full, so there was something shooting up everywhere, and I was clumsily careful not to crush anything tender if I wandered off the rock paths. In my own garden I have a second sense for where to step. Unlike my mountain soil that whisks away the constant rains, Lornet’s soil is heavy river-bottom silt that’s prime for growing Midwestern corn, soybeans, and—who knew?—hostas. It was a surprise to find oak leaves among the bare hydrangeas because oaks were such a part of my growing up, and I now live exclusively among junk alders and vine maples. And, unlike her daughter, Lornet only had one single plant out of the ground—a daylily she’d forgotten while transplanting some.

As we poked around her garden, it was exciting and strange for me to be among someone else’s plants, not knowing what was where or what I’d discover next. Mom, on the other hand, was among her old friends and glad to see that most of them had made it through the winter. Even some of her new additions were giving it a go. She was thrilled to find a bud on the scraggly oak leaf hydrangea start she got from Mrs. So-And-So during my last trip home. And the coral bell she’d bought half-price and half-dead was coming up strong. There were even some promising green shoots in the charred patches where Fa had burned off her ornamental grasses to help her with fall cleanup.

A lot of Mom’s flowers have stories behind them—who gave them to her, which cat’s grave they cover, what’s come up entirely volunteer. Her garden is beautiful, but the stories seem to be more important to her than the beauty (or scraggliness) of the plant. And as we walk, she recounts a complete narrative of which plants she’s moved from here to there since I’ve last been in her garden, the way you talk about how you played the last hand of cards while you’re dealing the next.

Under the hickory trees, I found masses of white violets growing freely in the grass. “Those were Grandma Dora’s,” Mom says. “They were in her dad’s garden. I guess some must’ve followed me from the lake house.” And, of course, Lornet has some of Grandma Marvin’s peonies and the tall orange poppies that grew along the fence by the road and were so stunning that when I was in grade school, the kids on the bus called it “the house with orange flowers.”

I was a bit surprised to see that Lornet has primroses, though, because they don’t seem like her thing. “Oh, those are from your house,” she says. I tiptoe though the hosta spikes. “Hey, they’re the old heirloom primmies that used to grow under the Big Leaf Maple before the builders put the Port-A-Potty there and killed them.” Imagine finding some of those among Lornet’s violets.