Happy Earth Mother’s Day

It feels like the right day to celebrate mothers, earthly and otherwise. After all, our roots are umbilically connected.

My mother used to love to tell this story about my early brush with the world of flowers.

One summer, when I was no more than six years old,  she gave me an envelope full of marigold seeds and a few instructions on how to plant them. This being the first time in my life attempting any such thing, the task became a kind of slow-motion adventure. I dropped a few tiny seeds into a soil-filled terra cotta pot, watered it and set out the pot on the sunny stone wall outside the front door of our Toronto suburban home.

Each day, I watered and waited. Watered and waited.

Some weeks later, I was astonished when the first shoot broke the surface of the soil. I grew amazed as the plant stalk rose up day by day to gradually fan out into tiers of lacy green foliage, its pattern as finely cut as a snowflake. I noticed a single plump green bud that appeared and almost overnight, out popped a ruffled pincushion flower of eye-popping yellow.

It so happened on the next Saturday, there was a garden show in the park across the road at the Civic Garden Centre, complete with contests and prizes. I walked over in the morning clutching the terra cotta pot with my one perfect marigold to enter the competition. In a hall filled with all kinds of flowers and against all odds, my brighter than yellow marigold won the gold ribbon that day.

At this point in her telling the story, I would interrupt to say, “Mum, that part never ever happened. I slept in  that morning. I never made it to the garden show and I never won a prize.”

That was the end of that.

Until the next time she told it, and once again, my heroic yellow marigold came out on top.

The gift

It’s only now I realize years later that the true prize was nothing to do with contests or ribbons. It was that my mother taught me how to grow life into seeds into a flower in a garden.

She introduced me to the mysteries of life itself, and held my hand for my first real encounter with the mother of us all, residing in the earth below.

I recently had the chance to tell the story of how I fell into the world of naturalistic planting design, initially sparked by my mother. You can hear me tell it on this guest appearance on Garden Masterclass in the UK, hosted by one of my formative mentors Nöel Kingsbury and Annie Guilfoyle.

My mother had many theories in life and some of them were even true. She liked to say I was a  late-bloomer and this one she got right.

Better to flower late than not at all.