Walking through a rose garden always reminds me of my father. Though my father was a professional landscaper, he told us he never had time to work on his garden. But with my grandfather's help, my father built a solid cement brick wall around the backyard of my childhood home. Along the outside of the wall facing Apperson Street, Dad planted eight rose bushes, each bush carefully selected for uniqueness and contrasting, accenting color.
Every Autumn Dad pruned and mulched these roses, and every month he'd dig in the fertilizer. By the time I was in elementary school, the largeness of the blooms was legendary in the neighborhood. Neighbors walking by exclaimed at their beauty. When my sister and I were five and three years old, the whiff of the petals' perfume overpowered us as we stood hand in hand by the garden gate to have our picture taken.
Though Dad complained about his work as a landscape gardener and came home covered in soil and exhaustion, puttering in his own garden gave him a grounded contentment. On the inside of the rose wall, bordering a backyard lawn, pathway and square red tile patio, Dad created a shade garden. First, he built a raised bed edged with a small one foot stone retaining wall, and covered this bed with a wooden lattice structure supported by the backing of the larger cement brick structure. Then he planted varieties of ferns, coleus, fuchsias and other shade loving perennials.
Across the lawn, opposite this shade garden, Dad sketched an oval-shaped array of wild flowers. Standing in front of this rainbow of color, I had my picture taken the day I graduated from high school. I was all dressed up in a golden suit with a broad brim hat. My hair was long and a friend had tried to do my make-up. I looked and felt like a tall, yellow daisy amongst miniature white ones. I was supposed to be so grown up, but from my over-protective upbringing I had no idea then what grown up meant.
In the farthest corner of the yard, to the right of the wild flowers, Dad installed a redwood-framed greenhouse. It was essentially a put-together kit, but Dad struggled over each and every pane of glass he set inside the frame. After all the toil, my father grew seedlings into plants only a couple of times. But he talked about turning the greenhouse into a small nursery business throughout his life. Like many of Dad's dreams, this one didn't make it out of the pillow case.
Near the hot house Dad installed huge dirt bins against the far wall. It was on this part of the wall where my brother, David, fell while goofing around with his friends. A loose brick followed his fall and hit him on the head. He ended up with a clamp on his scalp because he wouldn't hold still for the stitches. It was in these bins that a wonderful surprise took place. One Easter Sunday, my father brought home a huge white rabbit. A week later we stared open mouthed as this plump bunny began pulling out her hair and creating a furry nest in one of the bins. Soon there popped out thirteen pink and brown skinned babies. We had never seen anything so small, squirmy or ugly in our lives. Slowly they grew fur coats and begin to resemble real rabbits. Eventually, we had three gigantic cages of rabbits all dropping garden enhancing rabbit dung. We became the rabbit entrepreneurs of the neighborhood. Everyone became rabbit owners. Though, I remember losing one or two of these rabbits in the garden and never finding them again.
In our backyard were a number of orange trees. Before our house was built, this California land had been a lush orange grove. For years, besides owning orange trees, our tract of houses bordered what remained of this grove. Then one day instead of the buzz of bees or the wind circling through the trees, we heard constant hammering and buzz saws. New homes were under construction. After the workers left for the day, we would forage through the wood frames and cement foundations for “money,” the metal washers left behind. When families moved into these houses, the daughter in the house directly behind ours became my sister Donna's best friend.
The temperature of our summer days would often soar to over a hundred degrees. But we'd be splashing around in our wading pool and having water hose fights while sucking on oranges freshly picked from our trees. Or we'd sell home baked cookies and ice cold lemonade to friends and passing neighbors as we slurped and ate the profits. Little did we know then, but we could have been on a tropical island paradise and never had it so good!
In the front garden were two sweeping patches of lawn crisscrossed by sidewalks, overlooked by a bush lined porch. Here rolling in and being grass tickled seemed the natural game to play. On the sidewalks all the neighborhood kids learned to ride a two-wheeler on the same small bike with training wheels.
Bordering our next door neighbor's house, Dad built a small open, ranch style, cedar fence. In front of this fence he planted miniature pink tea roses. These tea roses had a particularly sweet smell and a magical fairy-like power which drew me and my imagination to them when I was a younger child.
Everywhere one looked there seemed to be a definite purpose and order to my father's garden. When the grass grew too tall, however, when the weeds crept in between the roses, we knew Dad wasn't happy. Throughout my childhood, Dad's moods were never easy to predict. One minute he would walk through the garden gate whistling, the next he would slam the gate in anger. This father who made beauty out of mud, where had he gone?
When my dad retired, he began spending longer hours in his garden. His face carried more weathered wrinkles, his hair was starting to gray and his talk was quieter and less harsh. His demeanor sagged, giving the feeling of aching sadness. With his children grown, his loneliness was visible. Dad often popped in unannounced on my college doorstep. I'd try my best to talk with him, but inevitably we would get into a fight about the political and social unrest of the 60s. I was a communist and a hippie in his eyes.
My dad's last unannounced visit was to the Pacific Northwest where I had settled. Though I was in my thirties, we still had the most difficult time communicating with each other. He mentioned this would be the last time he would make it up to Oregon. I didn't listen carefully enough to his words. Two months later he was raking the leaves off the roof and cleaning out the gutters of the house when he fell. He died in the hospital that night.
I wanted to spread my father's ashes amongst his roses. He would have loved being fertilizer. He would have loved being blown by the wind, pounded by the rain. But Mom and the rest of my family would never have gone for this. Instead his ashes, safely secured in a urn, were cemented inside a small boxed shaped hole in a wall surrounded by a small garden in a mortuary called Forest Lawn. I suppose some people would say it was an appropriate resting place for a gardener. But there was only one thing missing, rose bushes.
© 2011
