Mother's Plants

Shown is my late Mother’s donkey plant holder. 

 

Shown is my late Mother’s Scotty Dog plant holder.

My mother liked plants. She was raised as a South Carolina farm girl. She had two sisters and six brothers. 

When I was a small child, my family lived in a white-shingled house on Groce Meadow Road, Taylors, S.C. Taylors was a town located miles from our house. The Taylors post office serviced our “rural route” in upper Greenville County, so our mailing address was “Taylors,” though we lived near the rural Sandy Flat and Mountain View communities. That was a bit confusing to me, as a child.

I remember the side steps of our family’s house. During spring and summer, Mother kept an elephant ear plant (“Colocasia”) beside those steps. It grew from the ground and not from a pot. I liked that plant with its three thick, long stems and huge green “ears” that transported me in imagination to African jungles. 

Those plants are tubers and can’t survive outdoors in winter, I’ve read. I don’t recall Mother buying a bulb or digging up and storing a used bulb as summers ended. I think the bulb lay dormant in the ground and “came back” every year. Shirley, my younger sister and only sibling, says those bulbs can last for a few years in the ground if the weather isn’t too cold. Perhaps being planted near our house kept that bulb alive for several years.

A sage plant grew where the planted-in-fescue field met up with the mowed backyard of our house. Mother planted that sage; I recall its potent smell. Ornamental as well as useful, that plant’s gray-green leaves flavored dressing Mother sometimes served with chicken and gravy.

Mama liked “thrift,” but what she called “thrift” may have been “phlox subulata.”

The “Missouri Botanical Garden” site describes the “thrift” I remember helping Dad and Mom plant in our yard on Groce Meadow Road. That plant “crept” and spread carpet-like and could prick-tickle one’s fingers. Mother obtained most of her thrift from friends who gave her patches of it to plant on a small bank in front of our house. She also used “thrift” as a border for plants nestled near our abode’s foundation. I especially liked white thrift, which, during springtime, stood out visually in yards I observed while riding the Mountain View Elementary School bus.   

(From “missouribotanicalgarden.org: “Moss phlox [also moss pink, mountain phlox or creeping phlox] is a vigorous, spreading, mat-forming, sun-loving phlox that grows to only six inches tall but spreads to 24 inches wide. It is noted for it creeping habit.” That phlox blooms in April-May. Its flowers are red-purple to violet-purple, pink or infrequently white, sources say.) 

I don’t see thrift much these days. Maybe it diminished in popularity like the Chinaberry tree and “nandina” plants, also called “heavenly bamboo” or “sacred bamboo.”

Some jonquils grew in our yard. Their yellow blooms let us know when spring was arriving.

Mother groomed azaleas in our yard, of course. What proper Southern home didn’t?

My parents grew a grapevine that twined around a wooden latticework Dad built. Many farms cultivated grapevines. I suppose our property qualified as a “farm.” We owned 13 acres. Dad, an 84th Infantry veteran, returned from Germany in 1945, after the U.S. helped the Allies win World War II, and within a few years, he bought 13 acres of land. I suppose he intended to farm a little, “on the side.” Before the war, he had worked at Southern Bleachery, a cloth-processing plant in Taylors, S.C. He returned there after his “tour of duty.”

Our grapevine grew well and was located not far from the nice barn that Dad and his father built. It wasn’t weathered and old like most of the barns I saw in our section of the South.  

I guess Mother asked Dad to dig a hole for a kidney-shaped goldfish pond. (I don’t think Dad came up with that idea, because of the work involved.) He made an indention in the earth that measured about three feet across, about six or seven feet long, and probably two feet deep. He laid a thick layer of cement into the bottom and sloping sides of that pond. He had no modern plastic liner to use for our fishpond.

With my younger sister, Dad, Mom, and Mrs. Miriam Collins (our neighbor), I walked down into the woods behind the Collins’ house. Among tall pines and undergrowth was cradled a fair-sized pond with lily pads. Dad waded into that shaded pond and pulled up some lily pads, along with their roots.

We thanked Mrs. Collins and trekked up through the forest to her house. At home, Dad put soil and those lily pads into a wooden box he’d made. The box sat in the goldfish pond so that when Dad filled the pond, water came up over the box. The lily pads provided extra oxygen to help fish stay alive. I think Mother must have found her plan for a fishpond in a magazine or borrowed a plan from a friend. As far as I know, that pond never leaked and seldom needed water added. Mother bought a few goldfish in nearby Greenville, and those fish ate grasshoppers and other insects that ventured into the pond. That pond, a few goldfish, and those lily pads all thrived.

Mother wanted a weeping willow tree, and Dad planted it near the fishpond.

There are reportedly more than 400 species of weeping willows, which can grow up to ten feet per year. Weeping willow trees originally came from China, and are symbolic of death, thanks to their weeping forms.

Our willow’s limbs grew upward but its long, trailing shoots drooped toward the ground. From each branch grew flat, narrow leaves that pointed toward the sod. Our tree, as expected, helped our pond exude an Oriental appearance.

That tree gave an appearance of weeping, but its willowy appendages could cause one to shed real tears. When willow limbs became “switches,” tears followed. At times, after my sister and I misbehaved, we had to walk to the willow tree and each select a switch that would “stripe” our legs. I thought that being forced to select one’s own switch seemed a bit cruel, but that’s the way Dad often “spared not the rod.”    

Dad would hold the end of a switch in one hand and pull his other hand down that limb to tear off the leaves. He was left holding an almost unbreakable “whip” supplied by nature. A willow switch stings fiercely.

I like the form of a weeping willow and the slither of sound one can hear as wind stirs a willow’s limbs and leaves, but I never see a weeping willow that I don’t think about the sting of a willow switch on a child’s bare leg.

Mother liked to keep a few houseplants. I suppose I was five years old when my sister and I first visited Miriam Collins’ house, located just up and across the road that lay in front of our house. Mother called Mrs. Collins “Miirm,” pronouncing “Miriam” as a one-syllable word, and called Miriam’s husband “Thern.” Years later, I realized his name was “Theron.” The couple had four children: two boys and two girls. The boys were adults and lived on their own, as I recall. Thetwo daughters, nearly grown, still lived at home with their parents.

Miriam Collins’ white frame house sat back under huge oaks. The house sported a front porch, and a “good many” steps led up to that porch where chairs sat. The living room, clean and old-fashioned, opened into a dining area. Shaded by tall trees, the house seemed dark inside during morning hours when we visited. Two large dining room windows let in light for sun-seeking potted plants placed on tiers along one wall in that dining room. Mrs. Collins sold special containers and pots for plants. I don’t know if she sold pots to everyone or just to Mother, but she seemed to purchase extra ceramic pieces, and Mother bought several “planters” during visits we made on foot to the Collins’ house. (Mother didn’t have a driver’s license, and we had only one 1951 2-door, black Chevrolet. We walked to neighbors’ houses, if we went.) I still have two ceramic planters Mother bought from Mrs. Collins: a donkey that can hold a small cactus and a beige-colored “Scotty Dog” piece (five Scottish Terrier images are reproduced on the front of the planter).

Mrs. Collins had charcoal-colored hair that shaded to gray in places. Her skin was darker than her mate’s. During one of our visits, Mr. Collins walked into their kitchen while we stood in the dining area. I’d never seen Mr. Collins up close. He wore blue overalls and had fair skin that seemed to tint toward orange. I recall that Mrs. Collins didn’t say much as her marriage partner somberly looked at us with light blue eyes that appeared to be a lighter, faded version of the color of his overalls. I don’t recall that Mr. Collins spoke to us, and he soon left the house.

During my first-grade year at Mountain Elementary, Mr. Collins disappeared. A day or two passed, and, while at school, I wondered what happened to him. One day, after I hopped off the bus and entered our house, Mother told me that some men saw buzzards circling behind the Collins’ house. They found Mr. Collins’ body in the woods. I felt sad and wondered if they found him near the pond we had visited to get our lily pads. I wondered how Mrs. Collins felt about her husband’s passing.

Once in a while, I look at the two plant containers that Mother bought from Mrs. Collins, and I think about Mother and her plants and about Groce Meadow Road.