Greta
Author: Brittany Childers, Columbia Green Board
My mother loved her gardens. Growing up, we lived in Irmo, SC in a small home in the Friarsgate neighborhood where we had the third largest lot. Nestled up against a wooded area, Mom was able to use this space as a canvas for her dreams, which included a custom stone path, two small ponds with a connecting waterfall, multiple little pocket gardens, and for the kids, a pool, trampoline, and home-made swing.
We did not have a lot of money, but with a little ingenuity and a lot of blood, sweat, and tears, she transformed the space into an oasis. She put so much of herself into that garden: hand-painted stone pots, rocks she brought down from the mountains and placed with care alongside benches and arbors, a DIY device to drip water into a birdbath, because she read birds were attracted to moving water.
She planted trees, perennials, annuals, and a vegetable garden. She paid me and my siblings a dollar per grocery bag we filled up with the gumballs that littered the yard. At the time, I did not fully appreciate the amount of work she put into it; I only knew that I enjoyed walking the winding paths she laid, creeping up on bullfrogs and lizards that hung out by the pond, darting away from the three large koi fish who swam alongside goldfish and apple snails. No life was too small for her to cater to it.
In my mother’s garden, I began to learn the names of the flowers she loved—the tiger-lilies and irises, impatiens and mandevilla—and the birds she watched with her coffee, enjoyed from early in the morning to late at night; the chickadees and cardinals, orioles and a red-tailed hawk we named Tobias. Once, a Romani woman told my mother she had the gift of speaking to animals and I believed it. I still do.
After I moved out, my mom moved to a home with a much smaller yard in Lexington, SC. She built a small garden there, but had to leave enough free space for the dogs to roam the back yard. Here she tended to the perimeter, backed up against the woods again, where she now enjoyed seeing the occasional deer. She struggled to adapt to a garden with more shade than she was used to, but still had a beautiful little pond where the frogs laid their eggs beneath the lilypads, and a gorgeous Japanese maple hugging the backside of the house, a Confederate rose she inherited from the previous owner, and a clematis that climbed up the side of her bench swing each year. She spent the majority of her time sitting in the screened-in porch area of this backyard.
In the fall of 2021, Mom started to feel unwell. She didn’t tell us at first, hoping to hide it from us until everyone’s birthdays had passed. In February of 2022, just after my birthday, she came clean. We remained optimistic as doctors looked for reasons for her chest pain, until they finally did a chest X-ray and discovered stage 4 lung cancer.
My mother was a life-long smoker. I begged her from a young age to quit, but it would never happen, not even at the end when she was on oxygen. She’d sit in the heavily cushioned Adirondack chair on her back porch slowly working on a cigarette while we spoke about the annuals she wanted to plant in her last year, her body getting smaller every time I saw her, until I barely recognized her anymore.
What I learned in that year were some hard-earned, valuable truths that I’ll hold until it’s my turn to pass. That the love I held for her had to live on in me. That I had to be better, to grow for her, as her, in her place. That I had to carry the knowledge and love of nature she instilled in me. That to love myself and take care of myself was how I honor her and my own daughter.
During one of the eight hour stretches we spent at chemo, I told her that I’d learned that when she was pregnant with me, my body had already produced every egg it would carry, and so, she carried my daughter - mothers connected through the centuries through the genetic memory held fast in our wombs.
How do you honor a woman like that? Who had so many flaws, who certainly made mistakes, but whose every action built me into who I am today - flourishing like the flowers in her garden? We had some tobacco stock my husband’s father bought him when he was a baby. He divested the stock into a charitable fund that we used, in part, to fund a cut flower garden at the Museum of the Reconstruction Era at the Woodrow Wilson Family Home in downtown Columbia.
Last year, as the flowers began to bloom, I took my daughter there. As we took in the recently-placed plaque honoring my mother, she said, “This garden is for your mom?”
“Yes,” I told her.
“Because she died?” she said (she was four years old at the time).
“That’s right, honey, she did.”
“And this makes you feel better?” she asked.
It does.
Columbia Green hosts this Community Blog to provide a space for our partners and community members to write and share information and inspiration about gardens and gardening. Our partners include Historic Columbia, City of Columbia Forestry & Beautification, Midlands Native Plant Society, Gills Creek Watershed Association, the Smart Surfaces Team at SC Public Health Association, Columbia Garden Council, Columbia Master Gardeners Association, Mill Creek Greenhouses, Cooper’s Nursery, Gardener’s Outpost, and Blossom Plants and Produce. To submit an article for publication, see our submission guidelines on Welcome to Columbia Green’s Community Blog page. To become a partner, contact partners@columbiagreen.org.
