She moved to a small town in Idaho with a garden in her heart

March 26, 2011

We walked through the overgrown yard and there they were, nearly hidden under the weeds and tall grass: Dark red peonies. Wild roses. Lilac bushes. So, of course, we had to buy the house whose former owners had planted those wonderful vintage flowers.  

My husband and I now own the 1950s brick house in a small university town in Idaho. As soon as I had unpacked our boxes and organized my June Cleaver kitchen, I grabbed the weed bucket and headed out to the secret garden. Every day of late summer and into the fall, I dug and yanked and pulled away the undergrowth, watered the dry bushes and added spring-blooming bulbs. Before the first snowfall, those long-neglected flower beds knew that somebody loves them again.

I’ve always made gardens. When I was a little girl, my grandmother and I planted pansies and sweet peas for my dolls to play among. As a wife and mother, I made sure each of our houses had an herb garden. (How can you be an Italian cook without fresh rosemary, basil and oregano?) And always we had flowers – bright tulips, hyacinths and daffodils in springtime, romantic cottage gardens for bouquets in summer, and red and gold chrysanthemums blazing in autumn.

Every winter I draw detailed garden plans. Once, I even did a master design on the computer. Everything looks so neat and organized on paper. So sensible. Sometimes, in the spring, I even follow my plan and start with methodically laid-out beds of seeds and plantings. And then I find a local nursery and buy whichever seeds and plants make me smile and say, “Oohhh….We need that!”

I call it impetuous gardening, and it’s been my style for more than thirty years. I have only two carved-in-garden-stone rules, though: Rule One: Every year, my garden must include pansies and sweet peas. Rule Two: Not too many orange flowers. Great splashes of deep blues and purples, dark reds, lemon yellows, flashes of white for drama. But only a few touches of orange for contrast. (Pumpkins and carrots, however, are always welcome.)

One morning last autumn, I was working in our front yard. I’d dug up a wide patch of sod along the walkway and was transplanting the perennials I’d brought from our former home near Seattle. A young woman called to me from her bicycle. “Yeah! That’s what we do here! We dig up the lawn and plant flowers!” I couldn’t wait for my husband, Lee, to come home from work that night. I showed him the new front-yard flower bed (which already seemed too small,) and told him about the young woman who had explained The Local Way of the Garden.

“We have to dig up more of the front yard! Plant more flowers! It’s what we do here!” Whenever I speak in prolonged exclamation points, Lee’s worry lines come out. From nearly 40 years of experience, he knows that when I start exclaiming about what “we” need to do, the part of the “we” who will have to do the heavy shoveling, lifting or hauling will be he.