by Leslie Cox; Tuesday, March 26, 2013

One of the websites I like to “keep up with” is Gayla Trail’s at: www.yougrowgirl.com. Recently, she asked her fellow gardeners to join her in a new creative writing venture which she is calling the Grow Write Guild – a creative writing club for people who like to garden.

Every two weeks, Gayla will suggest a topic as a prompt to get the creative juices flowing through other gardeners’ dirty fingertips and on to paper, so to speak. We can share our words if we like, or not. But…the whole premise is to write down our stories of our gardening experiences and how they impact on us. Or, at least, this is what I have interpreted Gayla’s intentions to be in forming her Grow Write Guild.

I had debated about joining this group. After all, I already write regularly about gardening in my gardening column in the Comox Valley Record as the “Duchess of Dirt”, on my blog, in my garden journal and periodically for various magazines.

But Gayla’s first assignment for the new group is: “Your First Plant”. And that got me thinking. Perhaps I would write about that first plant and share the story after all because it is so much about what I shared with my dad who passed away exactly three months ago today and about who it is I have become. So here is the story…

My first plant – a Japanese plum tree I grew from seed.

Somewhere, I had picked up some Japanese plums from a tree in Victoria, British Columbia where I grew up. Very likely from a tree in Beacon Hill Park which my sister, brother and I visited frequently with our parents to feed the ducks, admire the peacocks and play in the playground.

I was 7 years old at the time and I vividly remember standing at the open back door of our new house, eating one of those Japanese plums before throwing the pit out into the unfinished backyard.

And it grew! Something of a surprise as our property was almost pure rock.

That very tree became the whole basis of the eventual Japanese-style landscaping of our back garden. There was enough room to put a nice-sized deck out from the house to the tree…complete with bench-seating under the tree.

Off to the side of the main deck, my parents partitioned off a courtyard from their bedroom which contained a smaller deck, an L-shaped pond, fountain, goldfish and a garden area around the pond.

How well I remember the weekend my granddad came over and helped with the building of that pond. My dad and granddad hand-mixing the concrete in my dad’s old stone boat, wheel-barrowing load after load, dumping each one into the form and us kids using long sticks, as if we were churning butter all day, to work the air out of the concrete.

As for the rest of the garden…there were two ponds beyond the Japanese plum tree using the natural depressions in the rock formations with a Japanese teahouse off to the right overlooking them. A nice place to sit and watch our resident mallard ducks, Victoria and Albert.

Off to the left of those two ponds was what we called “Dad’s office”…his planting bench and general storage area for extra plant pots and gardening paraphernalia. Mom finally talked him into putting a screen up in front to hide his “mess” from her view through the kitchen windows.

My dad worked hard at making compost to add soil into that rocky back garden, along with bringing some in. Eventually, there were plantings of bamboo, peonies, small trees and shrubs, zonal geraniums and a whole host of other plants…along with the tuberous begonias my dad so loved.

This backyard area, fashioned as it was around my Japanese plum tree, became a favourite area for entertaining family and friends.

But for me…the Japanese plum tree, in that yet to be finished backyard, became my focal point in enjoying the wildlife that visited our yard…pheasants, quail, racoons and a host of different birds.

Almost 50 years later…that Japanese plum tree is still the focal point of the garden, although it is someone else’s garden now. I have moved to Black Creek, a little further north of Victoria, where I share a large garden with my husband.

I miss my dad terribly but I will always be close to him in a garden. And especially in my garden where I continue to nurture some of the plants that were in my parents’ garden…in particular, a tree peony which has been in my family since about 1905.