A Gardening Remembrance
During a tour of my garden this past spring, I was challenged because I didn't have a cottage garden. "No cottage gardens? Why not?" was snapped at me in rapid fire order, the first question not waiting for an answer before exploding into the second. Cottage gardens have been around for a long time, but are the fad now. I read that back in "Merry Old England", that the gardeners in the "Lords" estates would bring to their Cottages cuttings and off-shoots of plants from the master's garden and combine that with their need to grow foods to supplement the dinner table. The cottage garden most used as an example is Ladieu Topiary Gardens, in Monkton, Maryland.
I keep seeing gardening articles and gardening center offering all the exotic, and fad plants of the day, and I shake my head in wonder. I grew up with a mother that was an original cottage gardener, and with few dollars available, exotic plants had no place in her garden concept. No, she didn't work at the master's estate, she was just a farmer's wife that wanted to make the home more pleasant for a tired husband and children after a day's hard labor on the farm. She blended flowers and shrubs into the garden along with the food crops grown for the dinner table.
The flowering shrubs, bushes, and the roses came from abandoned homesteads that my mother passed, saw in bloom and rescued. The green apples were from a cutting from Mrs. Roper's tree. The Peach, and the Fig were from Mrs. White's orchards, and the cherry was a cutting from Mrs. Horn's prize red cherry tree. The black walnut trees came from walnuts received in a bag of Christmas nuts bought at Mrs. Baker's store and mom hoarded and planted. The spring color was highlighted by daffodils, irises that we called Easter flags, early dogwoods, and wild plum bushes.
Our vegetable garden was quiet large, and contained everything from cucumbers to cabbage, including onions, green peas and beans. Our generous supply of potatoes, corn, pumpkins, and tomatoes were grown in fields called "truck" crops that was both a food source, and a cash crop. That is my gardening remembrance, not plants bought from the garden center.
My home county in Arkansas had been a large agriculture area in the late 1800s to early 1900s, but it was dry land farming on a poor soil in the foothills of the mountains. Slowly, but surely the farmers gave up, and went elsewhere, abandoning the old home sites. The homes disappeared back into mother earth over time, but the gardens were left regardless of how overgrown they became. It was easy to recognize old home sites by the typical square border of shrubs, bushes and trees that looked out of place, and many times not native to that region. In South Central Arkansas a common marker of an old home place was a black walnut tree, rosebushes, and daffodils in the spring.
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