By KAREN MADORIN
Who knows where my idea of a Grandma Garden came from? I don’t.
Neither of my grandmothers had time to garden. Both worked to supplement social security checks. My mom preferred vegetable gardening to growing flowers. My husband’s mother had a gorgeous yard full of intriguing greenery, including rows of tall castor bean plants and grape vines. However, cottage gardens didn’t interest her. Latent genes apparently rose from primordial British isle soup, urging me to create an old-fashioned flower bed.
When we moved to Logan, that yard had beautiful roses and daisies to initiate some old-timey tendencies. A former colleague and friend encouraged this by sharing an envelope full of what her son called “purple Anthony seeds,” larkspur--in reality, to sow a flower bed. Later, I carried seed from her original contribution as well as my Logan daisies to the Wind River Mountains of Wyoming where they brightened my yard and a friend’s every summer.
Somewhere along the way, Mom contributed hollyhock seed, which also thrived in high-altitude summers. When it came time to boomerang to western Kansas in August of '21, I collected seed like crazy, hoping they’d transfer once again to another yard.
It took time to make this dream of a dedicated Gramma Garden come true. A friend donated limestone blocks from a fallen building, which my hubs arranged into a rectangle that resembled an old family cemetery plot so much our that our daughter titled it “The Graveyard.” That fall when he filled it rich soil and newly buried hollyhock buttons, her description seemed even more apt.
Green growth rewarded us the following spring, but we knew it would be at least one more year before we or any pollinators enjoyed blooming spikes.
I added another friend’s contributed black-eyed Susan seed along with my daisy, larkspur, Indian blanket, and milk weed collected in Wyoming. Everything came up except the milk weed. Last summer, we questioned the sparse growth, but encouragement from this spring’s abundant rains has caused those crowded plants to compete for resources.
Gardening guarantees practitioners never get cocky, which certainly holds true with this Grandma Garden thing.
I situated the hollyhocks dead center and thought I’d equally distributed other varieties around the taller plants, intending to see various blooms from all sides. Ha! Somehow, daisies, coneflower, and Indian blankets flourished to the east behind the taller plantings. From our deck-side vantage, we enjoy hollyhocks, larkspur, and black-eyed Susans.
Like all things nature, this requires patience to correct. I’ll harvest and redistribute seed until the variety I want grows on every side. Then I’ll toss in blue flax and Mexican hat. I haven’t given up on adding milkweed either, but after two years of failed planting, I need a better plan.
Not only do we have old-fashioned blooms growing in the new bed out back, I distributed seed alongside my husband’s shed, at the back of the house, and around our big shade tree. Butterflies, bees, and hummers can sip nectar or collect pollen there as well.
Mom’s experimental hollyhock seed planted along the edge of the brick have rewarded us with beautiful pink blossoms this year.
In a perfect world, I won’t need to hang a humming bird feeder because those little migrants will dine al fresco in Grandma’s Garden.