May 12, 2019 In memory of a gardener, my mother

My mother, Harriet Mears, died on March 18. She was 97 years old.
We are in Springfield, Missouri this weekend, with all the family, for her memorial service.
We are all staying in her house. She had lived in this house for almost 50 years. She was able to live here until the month before she died.




I thought I would write a little about her in this garden blog. I am a gardener today because of her influencer.
My mother grew up in Brooklyn, New York. She lived in a house with a tiny front yard, and room for a garden in the back. Not long before she lived there, in the 20's and 30's, there were still farms in the area. We visited my grandmother and aunt in that house when I was little. I remember the little bit of grass in the front yard. I remember being in the backyard.

We moved to Springfield from North Carolina when I was 8. That was 1957. My father had gotten a job at Drury College, here in Springfield. My mother later joined him on the faculty.
But you can read that obituary stuff in the link provided.

I want to talk about my mother and gardening.
Between 1958 and 1970  my family moved 2 times, each time going to a different house on the same block. It was one block from the college. We moved into this current wonderful house in 1970. I was mostly off to Grinnell College by then. I came home and lived in this house for one summer before becoming a full time Iowan. Julia and I got married in 1971.

My mother gardened, in addition to everything else.
I have two early  memories.

In the late 50's it was a time for business expansion in Springfield and everywhere. The neighborhood was mostly old residential. But there was the college next door, and a hospital a block away, both of which were expanding. That meant knocking down old houses, for new buildings, or even parking lots.
When a house would be marked for demolition my mother and I would go scavenge for plants. I remember getting many iris in particular, but there must have been other plants too. She still has many iris. See the pictures below.

I find a bit of irony in looking at her garden and thinking about what I might take back to Iowa. There are nice tall white Iris. They have not yet bloomed. We will come back in June. Maybe after they bloom that can make the trek north.
Having plants from someone else's garden allows you to remember that person.

The second memory is going after weeds in her garden. I remember getting a penny for each weed I pulled. I guess I must have learned what a weed looked like.
I suppose the cost per weed may have gone up in 60 years. I am not certain I would trust many 10 year olds to weed my garden.


Her main garden was here at the house on Washington Avenue where we moved to in 1970. She gardened here for almost 50 years. She grew roses. They were enormous roses when we pulled into the driveway Thursday evening.

I do not do roses. You have to draw the line somewhere.
But mom would grow roses and bring them in to adorn the kitchen and dining room tables. One of my jobs this weekend will be to make some of those arrangements. In fact my sister and I picked roses for the luncheon following the memorial service yesterday.

Mom would cut branches of the forsythia bush early in spring and bring them inside. They would then bloom while the bush outside was still just waking up.
Several pictures of some flowers on the table appear in the last section of today's post.

Our gardens did overlap. In the 90's I brought her hosta. Years later I brought her hellebores, which I did not discover until about 2001. I took back some of her Siberian Iris. I also took back a small wavy hosta that she had from her mother from the Brooklyn garden.
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She had a wonderful kitchen in this 100 year old house. ( Please pardon me if I struggle with verb tenses.) There are many windows. There was a long kitchen window sill, which is similar to what we  have in Iowa City. If anything it was a little deeper than mine at home. As I look at that sill closely I realize that someone actually built an extension out about 2-3 inches.
There are three little orchids as I sit here in the quiet house and write early Saturday morning. There are also two wonderful hoyas, hanging over the counter with the sink. They will go back to Iowa City. I had made a cutting from one of them just two years ago. It is doing well. It will be joined by these bigger plants. I seemed like they were always in bloom. There is a bud on one today. I wonder how they will like the outside. (They do have to come inside for the winter.)

We talked about each other's garden each time we talked on the phone for the last 50 years.
I would tell her what was blooming. She would tell me what was blooming.

We took vacations with my mother, and my father as well, before he died in 2001.
My mother lived for almost 20 years in this house, by herself. That in itself was a remarkable feat.
On those vacations we would visit the botanical gardens in the area. We really liked the Denver Botanical Garden. Several times we took my mother to Longwood, the wonderful garden outside Philadelphia.
I remember being impressed with her stamina at Longwood, walking for over an hour, when she was in her late 80's.






Here are two pictures with family. On the left is mom, Katie and Christopher at the baptism in New York City 2 summers ago.

2003 in Chincoteague

Here is the full obituary.

https://www.legacy.com/obituaries/news-leader/obituary.aspx?n=harriet-mears&pid=192717107





Here is the kitchen, with the many things on the window sill and the hoyas.

blooming iris

Springfield is about 350 miles south of Iowa. Coming south in the springtime for visits has always meant you could see gardens in a different garden season than back in Iowa. This year that meant we saw phlox in the ditches about half way here. Now that we are here there are tall blooming bearded iris.

Front view of the house

Here is the mantle in the living room. My mother made the sculpture many years ago.














Now the service is over. Things are quiet again.
We live in our memories.
Then we make more memories.

Back in Iowa

Back in Iowa,  time remains frozen. Thursday, our travel day, the high temperature was in the 50's.
The bluebells continue.
I expect we will get home and my own grown tree peonies will still be in bud.
In the meantime this past week the rhododendron is in full bloom. The pink makes a great contrast with the bluebells. One could almost think there should be more.







These are Korean merrybells with the bluebells.














The pink crabapples are having what could be their last bloom. They are reaching the end of their time.
I am trying to replace all of them with dogwood trees. Two dogwoods are now planted with a space reserved for a third one this year.







Here is the backyard. The iphone picture distorts the image a little.






Morning light always creates magic.





Liberty shines sometimes.






This might be my favorite dwarf iris.





This little daffodil is just about the latest to bloom.



This is iris cristata. It is a wildflower.
It is planted in different parts of the garden, but reliably blooms just about the same time.






Closeups can be marvelous.




This little tree peony bloomed before the ones I grew from seed. Those are till stuck in the time warp call the Iowa Spring.



The dogwood has started to bloom. That tree was a birthday present for Julia probbly 30 years ago. This picture is taken from our second floor bedroom window.

Julia's Recipe

Elemental rhubarb or rhubarb sauce

In the Midwest in the spring, there is rhubarb. It is spring, and there is rhubarb at the farmer's market, looking at once sturdy and Midwestern and also attractive and inviting. I have shared recipes for several rhubarb forward baked goods. Today I have basic rhubarb - rhubarb sauce. It's easy and tastes good, and you can freeze it to eat in the winter when spring feels far away.


This recipe only has 3 ingredients, and one of them is water. For 8 cups of cut up rhubarb, you will need 1 cup of water and 1-3/4 cups of sugar. That's it.

I started with two bunches of rhubarb. I cut off the ends, and I gave the stalks a rinse. There is little trimming besides taking off the ends: critters do not appear to like rhubarb so there is nothing like insect damage or evidence of chomping to be dealt with.






After the trimming and rinsing, I cut all of the rhubarb into 3/4 - 1 inch pieces. I did not measure. Bigger pieces are fine in this recipe, although smaller pieces would be the rule for baked goods like pie or coffee cake.

I ended up with 8 cups of rhubarb pieces, which I put in a big pot.








I added 1 cup of water and about 1-3/4 cups of sugar. I put the pot on the stove, turned on the heat to medium high, and brought the mixture to a boil.












I gave it a stir, turned the heat down so the rhubarb was bubbling gently and went away for maybe 20 minutes. When I came back, the pieces of rhubarb had softened to such an extent that one could fairly call the product a sauce.

I let it cool and then ladled it into 2 quart yogurt containers, ending up with a full quart and a half of another or about 6 cups.

That's it. It freezes well. It tastes great on plain yogurt or vanilla ice cream. Or plain.

If you want to get fancy, I suppose you could add a bit of cinnamon (maybe 1/2 teaspoon) or a teaspoon of red hots (a retro touch) or maybe some citrus zest. I would add the extra stuff about halfway through the cooking process.

Odds and the end

A few more thought about my mother.
How is it that you remember someone?
Friday I weeded part of her garden. She would have loved how I pulled up that creeping vinca that had tried to strangle some of her iris and a clematis.

She would also have loved the flower arrangements we prepared for the reception after the service.

Here are pictures of two flower arrangements I found at mom's  house in the past. She always had flowers on the table from the garden. (She also had made the placemat under the hellebore.She was a weaver.)

This is a magnolia blossom from the very large tree in her front yard.













Yesterday, my sister and I went out and cut some roses for the table. We added some variegated Solomon's seal. I had brought that to her many years ago. It is really great in flower arrangements. There were even a few peonies that joined the effort. Those peonies and the roses kept opening as the day went on.








This was an arrangement of salvia, roses, and some available evergreen with lots of grey berries.

I am not quite finished with my mother.

You met my mother at the beginning of the post. She was 97 when she died.
She had lived during so much that went on in the world.
She had done so much and affected the lives of so many people.

While we were here this weekend we went through many pictures.

I thought I should show you these two pictures from when my mother was young.

Time brings so many changes.
My mother is so young in these two pictures.






















But no one would suggest for a minute that she would have wished to go back and do that time over again.

There is so much to celebrate and to remember and to carry with us.















There really is nothing else to say.
Philip