Remembering Mary

Late last spring, as I worked in my garden, my neighbor––like Mary and Harold, Joe and Gwen are original owners of their home––called me over to the fence. He said, “Mary would be so proud of you. She loved her garden.” Sudden tears filled my eyes. To be told my work would have pleased Mary, is the greatest gift.

Mary and Harold Minges, the only other owners of my 60-year-old house, clearly loved their gardens. Plants from the governor’s mansion—a perk of Harold’s state patrolman job driving some long ago North Carolina governor—sets the yard apart from the neighborhood. Azaleas, a spectacular dogwood, huge camellias, a six-by-six-by-six foot gardenia (until I cut it back to set a volunteer Japanese maple free—sprung up, no doubt, from a whirly-gig seed blown from the neighbor’s large tree), bulbs of many varieties, and a lot of things I could not initially identify, surround the perimeter. Harold’s death thirty-four years before I came on the scene, and Mary’s declining health but stubborn determination to stay in the house until her death at 94, showed in the abandoned, overgrown garden when I moved in.

A wild rose grown amuck and an old clothesline twined through azaleas and berry-laden leather leaf, and completely engulfed another small Japanese maple and three hydrangeas. Shrubs and bushes tangoed with each other, like dirty-dancers blending their bodies into one. English ivy was completely out of control. And the strip of earth around the house—save for a few do-it-on-the-cheap plantings stuck in the ground by an out-of-money or completely unimaginative renovator—was a blank slate.

I had no idea when I bought the house that I was going to transform the gardens, and in the process, myself. I had not, after all, ever been much of a gardener, of either land or soul. But there was nothing much to do inside the house––and it was Easter––so I set out to resurrect the yard. I did not know where to start, but my first inclination in almost any task is to just dive in and see where it takes me. Taking time was the first lesson the garden––and Mary––was to teach me.

I spent time walking and sitting. Looking. Trying to imagine what it looked like when Mary was in charge, and what I would like. It was a new energy for me to be in complete control of the vision. And solely responsible for any success or failure of both the vision and the execution. It was clear that nothing good could happen until it was cleaned out––and I like creation much more than the prepping step of any project. It was easier to jump into that part of the process though, and to trust that I would be better able to see what the garden wanted when the clutter was gone. It was not clear to me then that I needed the same thing in my own life. That was the garden's second lesson.

English ivy covered a horizontal six-foot swath along the east and west sides of the back yard and a vertical climb that roped through the bushes and extended dozens of feet into the trees, choking and smothering everything in its path like the front line of an advancing enemy army. The lawnmower kept it from encroaching into the grass, but the  very thought of extrapolation from the borders was overwhelming. I kept at it, though, section by section for the next few seasons. Eventually the work became pleasing to me, both in its own right and as a way to work through the pain in my life. The task was different at different seasons. Hot and itchy in the summer, as I kept a lookout for copperheads. In early spring, when it was more or less dormant, it pulled free more easily. But it became an obsession. No matter the season––summer rash or frozen winter ground––I could not walk by, with or without my gloves on, and resist freeing an area of its ivy vines. As I healed the garden, it healed me. The ivy can never be ignored. It is cleaned back to the fences now, but has to continually be monitored to keep it there. Another life lesson for me: no pain or struggle is ever completely eliminated. They keep revisiting, must be entertained, and then sent back to the fence.

At the same time I pulled the ivy, I disentangled shrubs, cleaned out the wild rose, and set to work on creating a new garden on the west side of the house. As I worked I uncovered more of Mary's garden: dozens of buried flagstones and large decorative rocks; bulbs and other perennials that had been smothered in the ivy, unable to breathe. I have a dozen "artifacts" displayed on my fence, dug up in places that must have been gardens at one time, but that had long since returned to lawn, until I restored them to garden. I found Mary's watering can in the tangle and used it until a hole opened in the thin galvanized metal bottom. It now rests from its labors in my garden of broken things, where it has an honored place and is planted with seasonal annuals.

Later this summer, my neighbor related another story of Mary. In her eighties, she was seen hauling wheelbarrow loads of soil from the front of the house to the back. Joe sent his son to help her, and he returned in short order and said, "Dad, I don't know how she is doing that. Her wheelbarrow has a flat tire!" Perhaps it has been in her honor that I have struggled with a flat-tired barrow all summer.

On a recent walk through the nearby cemetery, my favorite place to walk, I turned around from looking at a particularly interesting headstone, and there it was: Harold and Mary Minges. I sank to the ground and sat for long moments taking it in. I added ten years to the time that Mary had been alone, having not known exact death dates––though I had searched the internet.  I noted that Harold was born the same year as my own father, and that Mary––seven years older than her husband, unusual for that generation, though not unheard of in my own family––died at 94, the age my mother is today. (I also know that they had just one child, a son; and that Mary used the upstairs drawers for craft supplies, as do I, evidenced from the sequins and straight pins I found when I moved in. Another connection with the strong woman who was my predecessor.)

I am grateful for the spirit of Mary Minges in my garden, and for the love she had for the place she called home. I am lucky to know something about her, from my neighbors, the cemetery, and the evidence she left of herself both inside and out. One day I will leave. I will not live in this house for fifty-four years, for I am a traveler. I will finish my work on the garden. I will learn its lessons. And then I will move on, leaving the garden as a gift to the one or ones who come after. I hope they will love it as I do. Is it too much to hope that they will appreciate me as I do Mary? Most likely I will never know. Perhaps Joe and Gwen will someday tell them, as they have told me. But for now I trust that I will know when it is time to go.

My Mary was contrary, I think. She grew her garden, and refused to leave her home until her time on earth was finished. I hope she knows how much I appreciate her gift. I hope her spirit does inhabit the garden as I imagine it does. I lift my glass––from beneath the dogwood tree––to you, Mary Minges.