160 Oak Ridge Avenue

Here is another painting done by my mother. Recognize the bougainvillea? This intrepid plant moved with my parents from where you see it here, our childhood home in New Jersey, to Brookline, Massachusetts and eventually to Andover where they retired. I am told that the plant was a gift to my mother at the time of my birth by one of her Summit Garden Club friends.

"Boug" as we all called her, thrived under my mother's care for thirty six years. My mother had a way with plants. Boug was a tropical plant that had no business blooming unabashedly in the chilly Northeast. But she did- until my mother died and the plant that we had all admired, was given to me. She was never the same after that. I think she missed her original owner as much as I did. We were kind of a sad pair; finding it hard to no longer be in the glow of this talented artist/mother/horticulturist. But luckily this marvelous plant lives on, forever blooming in several of her paintings.

Mom used artistic license in the above work, going for a minimalist look. Our real life dining room was crowded with plants every winter. My mother brought all her treasured growing things in from the terrace to winter over with us inside. As the dining room filled with plants one fall, my brother John warned me, "you know one day, there may not be any room left for us in here." I looked at him wide eyed and then at the jungle of plants and our mother completely absorbed, bending over, watering can in one hand, lovingly plucking dead leaves off her tender charges with the other. I realized he might be right (being my older brother, he was right about most things as far as I was concerned.) I imagined our house overrun with plants; a tropical paradise right here on Oak Ridge Avenue.

I'm sorry to say, my mother's green thumb did not rub off on me. My sister inherited it lock, stock and barrel. Her gardens in the Willamette Valley of Oregon were unsurpassed. Having left her farm, she now has gardens all over town, taking over a plot here, tending someone else's garden there. She has plot in a garden at a local school, one at a friends house and one in her own small yard. Once you have the gardening bug, it doesn't go away.

Meanwhile, I settled on a rocky patch of New England soil, land of the Minute Men farmers. Every time you put a shovel in the ground you hit a rock. My mother and sister both surveyed my property. Never without an idea or solution, they said, "you have a perfect setting for a woodland garden." How lucky am I? A woodland garden pretty much takes care of itself. The native plant movement came just in time!