The yellow primroses in my front garden are finding their feet in their new home.
I dug them up from my mother’s garden just before we sold our family home in March.
They smile up from a shady corner just as they smiled up at ma and whispered Spring even in the darkest of days.
The flowers came from her sister’s home in Donegal.
It was ma’s spiritual home. She was never happier than tramping a lonely beach that stretched far as the eye could see.
Never happier than when she found a heap of tangled seaweed or a dried cow pat to take home for her garden.
She was even known to import Free State worms to enrich her soil – but was a careful gardener and ever vigilant for the New Zealand flatworm.
Around the corner from my aunt Eileen’s house was a dung heap guaranteed to make ma’s eyes light up.
Even as it enthralled ma who always carried her trowel (just in case), it equally appalled whoever had driven her to Donegal.
I come from a family of car lovers – it hurt them to fill up their beloved motors with manure. The whiff tended to hang about like a lost drunk at the sad end of a party.
Gardening was my mother’s escape. She took comfort in creating a beautiful haven.
She grew rhubarb and raspberries, onions and potatoes.
When we were small, she bribed us to weed the borders for her – a penny a foot.
She got geared up in wellies and an old straw hat and was a dead ringer for that old scarecrow on TV, Worzel Gummidge … so that, as children, we really rather wished she’d garden exclusively out the back.
What she taught us was that gardeners share – they are generous with their bridal gladioli; their blue Himalayan poppies; their flagged iris.
We ate home-made raspberry jam; rhubarb straight out of the garden, the first baby potatoes with butter.
After my father died suddenly when she was younger than I am now, she took comfort in long hours in her garden.
I’d drive up home and go seek her out.
She’d be on her hands and knees, digging for Ireland, as a cheeky robin perched close by, waiting for worms.
Those were days when the sun shone warm.
We’d drink tea on the back step and she’d tell me the names of the plants – the golden Philadelphus; the little rose called ‘Smile’.
She remained for most of her life a gardening luddite – believing in the power of the hand-held hedge clippers and the push-a-long mower, when the rest of us had turned electric.
Slowly, time pilfered her strength and she could no longer manage her garden.
She still made sure the small birds were fed and watered.
Her tea bags went from the pot to the front garden and I’d find them dropped on the front porch like calling cards.. sucked dry by a tiny beak.
In Ireland, even the sparrows are tea addicts.
There was a long time when we held on to our family home after she died.
We were holding on to a little of her.
The grass grew high and when I turned the key in the door and yelled “Hi ma, it’s me!” I knew I was talking to a ghost… but still.
In the grand clearance of over 60 years of a family home, it was the essence of her that we wanted to keep.
I inherited ma’s spade – the best spade I have ever had.
It cuts through the clay soil out our back and tells me how much I could do with a bag of well-rotted Donegal manure.
My sisters and I were never gardeners but ma’s love has caught us in our grief.
One has passed her RHS exams; she grows tomatoes and potatoes and plans for a beautiful garden. She enjoys the two small bluetits nesting in her kitchen’s old extractor fan.
The other has a garden filled with red and yellow tulips that sing sunshine. She also a garden chair that dangles on a spring and is only missing a cross-legged 1960s hippie cradling a bong.
In my garden, mum’s blue forget-me-nots are everywhere. I forget-her-not.
I have her iris, the peony Bowl of Beauty that she bought me on a long ago gardening trip and the little yellow primrose.
“Next year, I’ll divide it and we’ll all have some,” I tell my sisters. We’re gardeners. We share the love.
