My Mother’s Yard

My Mother’s Yard

My mother was a very creative person, in the sense of creating Things. She created food dishes like her mother and her mother before her did, by taking a few basics, and adding or subtracting ingredients until she had the dish tasting just like she want it to. She was intuitively savvy enough about sewing and pattern making that she could see a dress in a store window, and come home and modify an old Butterick pattern in newspaper and whip up a dress to fit herself or me or my sister for a fraction of the price of the store-bought dress. But her supreme creation was her yard. The lady had a vermillion thumb.

In 1949 when we moved to the new house on 13th Street, the 60x 110 ft. lot was absolutely bare ground, except for the small house and the large oak tree on one front corner. The sand which comprised the original earth had been covered over by the builder with a load of marl and a load of topsoil, spread very thin. Immediately my mother got a load of chicken manure from her father’s chicken farm and spread it on the front and back yard and raked it in. I don’t remember how she got it home to Fort Pierce from Orlando, or how long the yard smelled to high heaven. But soon the little sprigs of Centipede grass that she planted began to spread, and from there it was no stopping her.

In the thirty years she lived there, she covered every square inch with something—near the house she had hibiscus, all colors, double and single, and crotons, variegated and plain. Under the oak tree were hundreds of bromeliads and her prize azeleas, nursed along in the too-hot climate by her daily watering and the thick mulches of oak leaves. In the back yard she had had the good fortune of being at the right spot at the right time when the guy running for County Commissioner had come by with a pick-up truck filled with young citrus fruit trees, which he was selling for a dollar apiece. She bought four, two orange and two grapefruit trees, which either she or my father planted. Once in a while Daddy would bring home fish heads that she would bury around the fruit trees, like the Indians showed to the Puritans. Over the years she added a lime tree and an avocado tree.

In one corner of the back yard there was a date palm, and in the other corner a cabbage palm. Along the side edge of the lot she had hedges of Crepe Myrtle, pyracanthus, ornamental hot peppers, and oleander. One year the whole south side of the house was filled with poinsettias.

Having grown up on farms and having had to work in the fields, she wasn’t partial to growing vegetables or even cut flowers. Her Dad always had a truck garden that gave us lots of fresh vegetables and her Mother always grew flowers to cut for the house or to decorate her church. But Mama grew shrubbery and perennials, and fruit trees.

And all with just a couple of watering hoses, a sprinkler, a rake, a shovel, a trowel, a wheelbarrow, a lawn mower and a pair of gloves. She never bought fertilizer. She mulched with oak leaves and semi-composted clippings. She figured out what the minimum charge for water was per month, and how many gallons that represented, and read the water meter frequently so that she could use up every gallon of water on her yard that she was going to have to pay for anyway. She got up early in the morning in the summer so she could be out watering before it got too hot. She always had cuttings rooting in water in mayonnaise jars next to the back steps. And she did all this in housedresses. She never wore shorts or even slacks, and I’m sure she never even owned a pair of jeans.

When they moved to the next house, she had already developed rheumatoid arthritis and she never was able to work in that yard in the way she had in her first house. But my sister and I both still keep crotons going in pots from the plants Mama took with her from the 13th street house to the one near US 1. It seems as much of a legacy as a piece of jewelry, and much more symbolic of Mama.