On Gardening & Our Health
Mariana Greene has written a column for the Dallas Morning News called “Gardening Fool” for several years and I’ve always found it delightful. With regret I read her column on June 4, 2015, announcing her retirement.
She reports that she will continue to garden and will perhaps have more time to sit in the garden, admire the flowers, listen to the bullfrogs, enjoy the songbirds, marvel at the blue Texas sky, and, in general, enjoy her garden.
She lists her reasons for gardening: “It connects me to the earth, not the Internet. It is a visceral link to my mother, my aunts and my great-aunts, and my grandmothers, whom I never knew. They all worked the earth, first to feed their families, later to add beauty to their workaday lives.”
I read that passage and realized how important gardening is for me. Both grandmothers were gardeners, my own mother and the aunts and great-aunts.
Great-aunt Mae Hughes Milam and her old-fashioned petunias because they smelled so good (even though they are so unruly in the garden; I took joy in seeing a pale lavender petunia sprouting in a crack this summer).
And my grandmother Hicks somehow keeping lilac bushes alive with the fragrant blooms each spring (I keep trying and have probably my tenth in the ground, planted this spring; someday I’ll find the correct place for one). Her garden with rows of hollyhocks on the garden fence, seed brought from Alabama, reseeding here year after year; again, I keep trying.
And grandmother Agnes Kirk Hughes with a perennial sweet pea brought from South Carolina which outlived her by 40 years. And she returned from visits home with the Carolina Rose of Sharon with new color varieties not seen in Mt. Vernon.A fanatic gardener, she built frames to protect her gardenias in cold weather and maintained a formal rose garden and iris bed. And I come by her home after school at the age of twelve to find her crying because painters had trimmed her pink wigelia back to a bare trunk. I have succeeded in maintaining all of her plants, even one snake plant which I dutifully bring indoors each winter; all except the wigelia – perhaps I am not meant to succeed with that.
And the stories of my great-grandmother Melody Aikin Hughes receiving a gift of dahlia tubers from a friend; thinking they were akin to sweet potatoes and cooking them up for a supper at her home on Holbrook Street. We all planted dahlias for years afterwards in memory of that first failing.
And the reflection from my Aunt Ivey Hicks Smith that her father always planted rows of zinnias and marigolds among his vegetables. And I continue the tradition of John Marshall Hicks whose garden spot I still own (where he was found dead behind his plow in 1953). I don’t think the grandfather Hughes was a gardener in any traditional sense (all business) but he indulged his wife’s spending on her garden at their home on East Main where a japonica planted at the new home in 1927 still blossoms each spring.
So, Mariana Greene reports that research confirms what gardeners already know: “Gardening benefits emotional and physical health for people of all ages and physical capabilities.”
I want to repeat a part of the Greene column here. It is worth sharing. She talks of the pleasure in working toward a sustainable garden taking little supplemental watering. The satisfaction in planting for butterflies, pollinators, hummingbirds and wildlife.
“What matters is that you interact with nature, learn the difference between contractor fill dirt, which is mostly lifeless, and natural soil teeming with life and an almost intoxicating smell. You become more acutely aware of the change of seasons and the path of sun and moon across the sky when you garden.
“Those who have tasted the flavor of a just-picked, sun-warmed, vine-ripened tomato or deeply inhaled the perfume of an antique rose or silken gardenia or smiled at a baby bird begging its parent to be fed know why we garden.”
I hope you find the inspiration to plant something reflecting your heritage as we move to fulfill the mandate of our Texas Historical Commission “to tell real stories.”
The city has a number of lovely nineteenth-century homes, but most were built after the war. Several antebellum Civil War era homes are located in the area. These include Mimosa Hall, home of John J. Webster; Freeman Plantation, one mile west of Jefferson on State Highway 49; Sagamore, at the comer of Dixon and Owen streets in Jefferson, and the Alley-McKay House, 306 Delta Street in Jefferson. Most are open at certain hours for public tour.
