I know people who insist on creating original landscapes in their
yards. They either begin with a clean palette and scrape their property down to
bare earth or they buy homes in brand new subdivisions where all the dirt is recently
backhoed and then leveled by earthmoving mega-machines. Once these individuals
draw up their plans and plant accordingly, they have designer yards that draw
the eye to appealing areas throughout their lot. This is one way to create beauty
around a home. Another is to enjoy what previous occupants have planted and
work around the property’s history.
Since I was a little girl, I’ve enjoyed investigating other people’s
gardening talents. My great grandmother lived near Buckner Creek in Southwest
Kansas where she cultivated irises, peonies, and black berry canes someone had
tucked around her house before she moved in. As a toddler, I examined her
bearded irises and thorny berry plants from a nose to petal point of view. Somehow,
I understood these mature plants had lived in this place longer than Grandma had.
I also got the idea that they connected her and me as well to whoever optimistically
planted them in a land of little rain.
Because of those early experiences, I’ve always loved moving
into homes with already established plantings. Lovely wild rose bushes with
once a year yellow blooms, peonies, poppies, purple and bronze iris, naked
ladies, and lilac borders graced our first bungalow built in the early 1900s. Their
cycles of scented blossoms brightened that yard for decades and continue to do
so two owners later.
We were only the second residents of our next home, but the couple
who built that house transplanted iris tubers and lilac starts from their
family’s original homestead into their new yard. In addition, they’d added rose
bushes, purple phlox, and blue flax to enhance the native prairie flowers that
surrounded them.
One of the attractions of our most recent real estate
purchase was the pretty yard surrounding the house. That owner landscaped with
new plantings to increase the curb of appeal of her property, but she also
incorporated old-fashioned poppies, peonies, daisies, butter and eggs, day
lilies, and violets that add a nostalgic touch to the yard. While I love the
roses and shrubbery this gifted gardener chose to border the house, I most
enjoy the plants she transferred from her farm and other people’s flowerbeds.
What I like best about plantings passed down from the generations
who first turned these prairies into homes is that they connect us to real
people who longed for reminders of where they came from. They were dead tired
from just surviving, yet they made time to turn up flowerbeds around their
homes. Even more telling, they shared precious water with rootstock or seeds
they either ordered or carried from more settled regions of America and Europe.
Drive by any dying community or abandoned farmstead and you’ll
see remnants of lilac borders, iris or peony beds, and poppies that now escape confinement.
The humans who planted them are long gone. Equipment they left behind rusts in
weedy yards that come to life each spring with improbable lavender, pink, and
bright orange blooms that fleetingly tell stories of those who came before.
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