Flowers for Gran

We walked through Violet Johnson’s garden and found beauty where there should have been none.

This has been a bad summer in east Texas, with little rain and lots of heat, but her wisteria vine, with its faded purple blooms, grows untamed over what used to be a child’s swing set.

I snipped off a few of the long branches and handed them to my wife, Sharon, and we continued on.

The white spider lillies, growing in the shade by the house, looked good, too, and so we picked several, along with a holly tree branch, heavy with green berries.

Across the way, we found a patch of purple cone flowers, which had long since dried up and turned brown.

This would have been fine with Violet.

She preferred a natural garden, where plants were left to do whatever they do, and so we added the cone flowers to her final arrangement.

Being in this garden, on the day that Violet would be buried, was hard for Sharon. Violet was her grandmother, the woman she called Gran, and this was a place the two of them had always shared.

Growing up, Sharon was the sort of girl who’d rather plant a blue salvia bush than play with a Barbie doll, which made her exactly like her grandmother. And so they would play together in this garden, planting flowers, digging holes, getting dirty and being partners.

When Sharon left Texas for Florida, her grandmother would mail her seeds from this garden. Sharon would come home from visits with bulbs and cuttings, some of which now grow in our garden in Florida.

There’s one gladiola in particular, with blooms that look like tiny, yellow moths, that we always hoped Violet would see, but she never did.

Even so, there’s a lot of Violet in our garden. Sharon planned it that way. There’s structure to it, but there’s also that rough edge of nature always showing through.

A garden reflects us, and so does the place where we live. There are lots of demands on people these days, and few of us have the time to tend a proper garden. Still, it’s how we choose to use our spare time that tells the story of who we are.

Violet taught this to Sharon, who taught it to me.

So now, every chance we get, we work in our garden, and look for the beauty beyond the blooms.

That’s why the dried flowers ended up in Violet’s funeral arrangement.

And that’s why Sharon put a pine branch in there, too, with the pine needles and cones still attached.

We even found a few summer pears hanging on the tree. They went in, too, along with many more plants and shrubs that I can’t identify.

The arrangement became a wild tangle of color and texture, all framed by a whispy tendril of wisteria.

All of it came from Violet’s garden. It was who she was.

Art Levy has written stories about how other people think and feel for much of his career. Now, he’s getting a chance to write about how he thinks and feels, too. The result is Home Work, a home-improvement column he writes for the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. Many of the columns concern his ongoing renovation of a 1938 Colonial home in a rough St. Petersburg, Fl., neighborhood. The stories are often personal, but there’s usually a dose of practical home and garden advice in there, too. Levy also writes feature stories for the Herald-Tribune. He lives with his wife, Sharon, and their four-month-old son, Andy.