Garden Meditations
When irises were flowering across the Midwest a decade ago, I received a note from my friend, poet Ted Kooser. For several years, we’d penned epistolary exchanges on the subjects of gardens, writers, favorite books new and old, and occasionally on the disconcerting state of politics in America. But generally, our exchanges were conversations shared across the miles between two friends just in from their early morning walks. They were meditations—thoughtful and witty—filled with quiet observations by Ted on his Nebraska world and mine on our Missouri home.
In the fall of 2015, I dug up an assortment of iris tubers that spanned the color wheel from soft pastels to rich burnt copper and purples as dark as ink. Off they went to begin a new life in a region of Nebraska known as the Bohemian Alps, just north of Lincoln. Irises were a part of the garden of this poet’s grandmother in the little town of Guttenberg, Iowa. As his parents moved from one location to another, circles of iris tubers from his grandmother’s garden were divided and packed along with household belongings. Perhaps that’s why irises have such a stately, old world look about them.
In Kooser’s memoir, Lights on a Ground of Darkness, he writes of his grandmother’s irises that “began their journey long before I was born.” He imagines his grandmother a hundred years ago, seated on her front stoop, waiting for them to bloom. “An iris,” he wrote, “ offers its beauty and fragrance as if nothing has changed, as if no one were gone.”
Ted wrote in the spring of 2017 with news of the irises that I mailed to him two years earlier. “Dear Cathy: I'm getting some lovely flowers from those plants of yours! I'd run out and take a photo but it's cold and rainy. I'm enclosing a poem, new this morning, about my zinnia patch. Last year I planted a large area to zinnias and we loved it so I'm trying again. All the best, Ted.”
Soon after receiving Ted’s note, I responded: “Dear Ted, I’m so glad the Boomerang Creek irises are happy in your Nebraska garden. It’s been warm here and I've been getting the spring gardens in shape for the past week. Peonies and irises are already in bloom. Blossoms on the blackberry vines are beginning to form berries that will ripen in July. There’s always much to be done. And by the way, I love that you added zinnias last summer and are adding more this year. All the best Cathy.”
Every year I buy packets of assorted zinnia seeds with every intention of planting a spectacular bed of Crayola colored zinnias that thrive in the heat of late July and early August. Inspired by Ted’s success, I did plant zinnias in our meadow garden that spring and learned that they’re one of the very few flowers that Japanese beetles do NOT devour. When our Madrid-based granddaughter Inés arrived for a visit that summer, she found a bouquet of brightly-colored zinnias in her room.
A decade later, I planted California poppy seeds harvested and shared by dear friends in Los Angeles. This spring, they are thriving in a garden in our home in the Sierra Foothills. What a joy it is to share one’s garden across the hollers, miles and time!