By Marian Carache
Spring has finally sprung. And none too soon.
Every cold, damp day of winter, my mind found solace in planning to plant an okra bed in the back yard when spring was here again. Behind the okra, I imagined sunflowers. In another part of the yard, my mind designed an herb garden in a galvanized tub.
There would also be Mr. Stripey tomatoes, pots of basil and parsley, and some cayenne peppers. The very thought of planting my spring and summer gardens warmed me on cold winter days.
I came from women who worked diligently to have both fresh vegetables to feed their families and pretty yards to nourish our souls.
Mama waited every year for the Ferry Morse seed packets to be delivered to Daddy’s store. Due to her fortitude, I grew up surrounded in summer by zinnias, red poppies and larkspurs, snapdragons, impatiens, and periwinkles. She hauled in iron-ore rocks from the hills and built walls to surround her beds.
Scents from gardenia and tea olive bushes wafted through our screen windows at night.
Her summer vegetable garden provided yellow squash, what she always called “little green onions,” hot cayenne peppers, tart tomatoes, and tiny butterbeans.
There is a pattern, I realize.
Recently, a cousin in Maryland sent me my great-aunt Evelyn’s scrapbook. Inside it, I found a newspaper clipping of a teenage me pinning a corsage on my grandmother, who had just been honored with Life Membership in the Garden Clubs of Alabama.
One of my great-grandmothers died of heat stroke one summer while working in her beloved flowerbeds.
Although I appreciated the beauty my mama and grandmothers created, I didn’t participate in planting and growing until many years later because, as Mama complained, my “head was always buried in a book.”
But all was not lost. Because I loved books, Shakespeare, and Miss Marple quietly nurtured what my progenitors had inspired.
The British educator and botanist Leo Grindon maintained that Shakespeare is second only to the Old Testament writers in the number of references to trees and plants in his work.
Botanist and vicar Henry Ellacombe wrote extensively on Shakespeare’s use of nature, including his 1884 book The Plant-Lore and Garden-Craft of Shakespeare. According to Ellacombe, the bard never referred to a plant carelessly. Whether he used them as metaphors or symbols, plants carry meaning in Shakespeare.
My first vivid memory of realizing the power of plants was a scene in Franco Zefferelli’s movie version of Romeo and Juliette. I was in eleventh grade, but to this day, one of the scenes I remember best is Friar Lawrence in a meadow picking herbs that are supposed to help the star-crossed lovers, rather than kill them: Within the infant rind of this weak flower
Poison hath residence and medicine power.
This duality between what is fair and what is foul is a common theme in Shakespeare.
Shakespeare also gave us Ophelia’s famous soliloquy in Hamlet, when she is weaving flowers into a garland she plans to hang in a willow before taking her own life: a haunting, fragmented chant about the significance of each herb.
Likewise, Agatha Christie used her knowledge of gardening to create mysteries for Miss Jane Marple to solve and to further our understanding of human nature. Thanks to Miss Marple, I seek out foxglove for my flowerbed every year, but so far, I have not had much luck with it.
My ramblings about the virtues of plants and literature would not be complete without mention of my favorite novel in all the world, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, another classic rich in flora. By far the most memorable is the wild heather that carpets the moors that Catherine and Heathcliff run wild on. And once that wildness has been exhausted, the book closes with a soft wind, fluttering moths, and heath and harebells surrounding the sleepers in the quiet earth under a benign sky.
My own yard is now a haphazard palette, influenced not only by the authors who shaped me, but also by the family that formed me — a happy mix of imagination and rich earth.
The journey has come full circle. Thanks to so many sweet memories, visions of gardens and flowerbeds are dancing in the head that once was “buried in a book.”
Welcome, Spring.
