Gardening has helped us cultivate and maintain some connections with our neighbors.
We watch our neighbors go past our place for their late afternoon walks or jogs or runs, as we tend to our garden, plant newly bought perennials, or merely survey our flower beds and vegetable patches at the close of the day. The passers-by walk or run together as friends, as a couple, as a family, or even as a walking or jogging club. Many walk their dogs or cats; some neighborhood dogs “walk” their owners.
We exchange pleasantries – observing social distancing, of course. We wave or nod our heads. A few take a short break from their walk, and at rare times, from their jog to chat with me or my wife or my daughter from a distance.
People are naturally suckers for praises. We purposely shower passing neighbors with compliments, be it for their adherence to their walking regimen, their courage to venture out in these Covid home-quarantine times, their devotion to their pet dogs (or cats) that need
daily walks, or the awesome qualities of their pets (usually their good looks and breed). Our cats sometimes join us in the garden, and we do appreciate people complimenting our cats.
We encourage the elderly as they shuffle with their canes or walking sticks down the sidewalk.
These neighbors, in turn, sprinkle praises for our gardening care and diligence and for improving the look of the neighborhood. My wife, my daughter, and I have done all the gardening — we just can’t afford landscapers and gardeners, more accurately, we prefer to labor and reap the fruits of our joy. We reciprocate with whatever praises might be most appropriate.
We realize gardening for us is not just growing plants but also cultivating friendships and letting neighborliness bloom.
Our garden once became part of a budding teen-age romance. I remember two lovebirds, most probably still in their elementary grades, once asked for a stalk of my prized allium
giganteum. The young boy begged for the purply burgundy giant bloom for her big-eyed girlfriend.
I tried to persuade him to pluck a bunch of my nearby rosa grandiflora instead, advising him against the pungent onion smell of the allium in favor of the subtle sweet scent of the roses. Rose is the symbol of love, after all.
The girl clearly preferred the head-size ball-shaped bloom of the allium over the thorny but multi-flowered bouquet of lip-red roses. The boy, in all his ignorance about flower smell or fragrance, giddily concurred with his girl. So I could only oblige. I still wonder about their romance: it reeked like the allium or bloomed like the rose. I could only hope the young man had grown wiser.
When our tulips were blooming, I noticed a few young International exchange students (Japanese or Korean high school students home-staying with neighbors) staged their gleeful pictorials with the flowers.
With their fingers doing the “peace” sign next to their beaming faces, the girls would press their other cheek against the tulip blooms as they take turns taking each other’s pictures. They must be nostalgic of their homeland’s tulip blooms.
Before the Covid pandemic, our garden had found an unusual use. A lady who ran a cafe a few blocks down the hill from us habitually plucked roses from our front garden – usually in the early morning of Saturday – for her cafe’s coffee tables. In appreciation for her weekly harvest, she gifted us her early Saturday morn’s fresh mini muffins. If we were not out and about in the garden yet, she left the muffins by our entrance pathway perched on top of a row of manicured boxwood. Discovering the muffins in their colored waxed paper — with a cutesy note — was such a delightful “surprise” early Saturday morns. What a way to kick off our weekend of gardening.
Unfortunately, since the Covid pandemic hit, we haven’t seen this genteel cafe owner: no morning blooms picked, no muffins munched. We couldn’t help wondering how her business would survive after months of forced closure.
Fences are said to create good neighbors, but in our case, sweet smelling shrubs create better neighbors. We planted fragrant rhododendrons, sweet woodruff, Lily of the Valley, chamomele, and lemon balm at the feet of camella and sweet dame’s rocket, with jasmine and honeysuckle vines clambering up the bushy magnolia stellata, philadelphus, Mexican mock orange, and butterfly bush at the boundary line with our elderly neighbor to our left. We choose these plants and bushes so each can produce blooms that perfume the area in succession, from early March to August. Our neighbor enjoys sitting on her deck close to our border, and she adores the natural perfume wafting on her deck. We chat whenever we happen to tend the plants at the borderline, and she repeatedly expresses her appreciation for “her” special, all-organic perfumery.
Gardeners share treasured plants. Or, in the case of our former neighbors behind our property, they have been our generous cast-away plants-giver: two mature rhododendrons, spiraling barberry, and Oregon grape cuttings, to name a few.
These neighbors were quaint but very sociable. A former interior and costume designer, the wife was meticulous with her formal garden, tweaking it regularly to her haute couture standards. The husband was a house painter and builder. He crafted for her wife a diminutive tea seating area beside his masterpiece: an oversized koi pond. He also built for her an English gazebo, draped with wisteria, honeysuckle, and sweet peas that bathed the area with sweet perfumes especially at dusk when the couple would host tea parties for their tight circle of elderly friends.
The couple had invited us a few times to join their tea parties but we joined them but once
only, because we felt so out of place in a group of ladies and gents in their late 70s and 80s, maybe even in their 90s, chattering about how it was during the Depression and world war years, how the younger folks have become “less civilized and respectful,” and about their best-kept pie and “old Europe” dessert recipes. Their unabashed propensity to share the who’s who in the papers’ obituary section was quite odd and unsettling for us. And while we’ve been educated in chemistry, biology, and the health sciences, they lost us with their animated sharing of drug names and medications and human geriatric ailments.
Their grandchildren, who visited the couple on some weekends many, many summers ago quickly became my two children’s weekend playmates. Their grandpa even built a secret gate in our ivy-covered common fence, so the children could easily run through their formal English garden to our carefree cottage garden. For most of the summer weekends, the boys would play balls and rough and tumble games in our backyard; the much younger girls played dress-up in our garden or kicked soccer balls into our bushes and shrubbery; when autumn turned our backyard into a field of defoliated branches as the plants braced for the winter’s freeze, soccer and various plastic balls lay exposed among the hibernating vegetation.
Too bad, these lovely neighbors have moved out last summer to a seniors-friendly condo after a quick sale of their property. That move came quickly after the husband’s triple heart by-pass. We haven’t seen them since, but their flowering rhododendrons keep our fond memories of them still blooming.
Another former neighbor, the wife of a work colleague, dug a clump of dirt and some roots of
what she called “a beautiful plant” for us to take home after a work Christmas party at their newly-built country home. That clump of dirt and roots has now spread as a healthy colony of Japanese anemone, the mainstay of our middle garden throughout late August through to early October.
Japanese anemone is a long-blooming beauty, preening during a season considered as the period of diebacks and dormancy for most flowering perennials in our garden. Our former neighbor was right: her Christmas party gift was truly a “beautiful plant.”
A few years back, another elderly neighbor across the street came to our annual yard and plant sale with boxes of bromeliad Guzmania. She said she wanted her plants to have a new, good home. Couple of months later, she passed away.
Another elderly gentleman-neighbor donated blue Japanese irises that filled his mini car’s trunk for our plant sale. We sold most, but we kept a few clumps for our front garden.
He also offered us several potted lemon-scented German irises, begging us to keep them so those irises can bloom in the garden year after year, even after he had moved to a seniors’ care home. We made sure to plant a clump by our front steps, and another by our carport. For his memories’ sake. The clumps never fail to bloom year after year.
Our former neighbors were all elderly people, original owners of the old houses in our subdivision that was created as a close-knit mini-community in the late 1960s. We were the first “young” couple to move into the neighborhood in the late 90’s. And in our garden are the plants and the memories of these former aged neighbors, blessed with good souls. We cherish and celebrate their memories and friendships in the blooms of our home garden.
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(To read a recent related article of mine, click on the following link: How do you spring into Spring gardening? – Vendiola Miscellaneous Blog (wordpress.com))
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