A longtime gardening friend who is now entering his forties propagates sunflowers each year from seeds harvested in his garden the year before. He bought a packet of seeds just once, he said. It was 1978, the same summer he planted his first patch of zinnias adjacent to his mother’s marigold bed.

Then a funny thing happened in 2001. Among the six-foot teddy bears with their golden, bushy petals and the 12-foot Mammoths with their huge, bobbing heads swaying in the breeze appeared a rare red variant of an “Evening Sun” type that his neighbor featured in her garden the year before. Robert thanked the mason bees for their pollination prowess. The red offspring are just as impressive as the parent plant.

Robert loves color in his garden. More to the point, he loves the saturated colors that bring him back to his mother’s garden patch — marigold yellow, salvia red, the burgundy flowers of the trumpet vines that grew wild in the front yard.

Even the dense green foliage of all that privet that blocks the sun in his backyard is good. It reminds him of the curled leaves of pelargonium that grew in black-painted milk cans around his mother’s house. Everything in Robert’s garden has a touchstone, a direct link to memory.

As I stroll the garden this afternoon, I’m delighted to note that the delicately serrated foliage of angelica archangelica is coming back. A native of Syria, it has become naturalized in our cool climate. There are about 30 varieties of angelica, but this one is the only one officially employed in medicine. The roots, when candied, are delicious, as are the raw roots of day lilies, just popping up from the soil now.

In April, when the garden starts coming back in earnest, I also find myself thinking of gardens I’ve known. Unlike Robert, who has his feet planted firmly in reality, I’ve always lived comfortably in the imagination.

My favorite book of all time, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby,” has gone a long way in shaping the gardens I’ve made. Ironically, Fitzgerald writes of the eternal conflict between illusion and reality in the story of Jay Gatsby’s tragic pursuit of his dream.

Through the summer nights in Gatsby’s magnificent “blue gardens,” “men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars.” Laughter and music rose nightly from this glowing place.

Fitzgerald had it that Gatsby’s gardeners arrived the mornings after to repair the ravages of the nights before. Banks of fragrant white lilies, boxwoods, dripping lilacs, saxifrage, anemones, primroses, primulas, orchids and roses — all were returned to their glory. The remnants of dinners that may have included (cue imagination), Maine lobster bisque, Chateaubriand, champagne, and warm tarte tatin with vanilla ice cream were cleaned up from the pool side.

So where does this vivid world fit into my provincial garden?

Actually, it doesn’t. But like Robert, I have a memory of a garden — real or imagined — that each summer, fuels inspiration. Gatsby’s kingdom, elegant and beautiful, will always be out of my reach, a pulsing dab of green light far off in the night.

All the same, with the sounds of Irving Berlin in the air and puffs of blue hydrangeas readying to bloom, I’m writing a chapter of my own. Like Gatsby, gardeners commit themselves to the following of grails. Tomorrow alyssums will bloom whiter, honeysuckle will stretch out its arms wider.

Can’t repeat the past? Why of course you can.

Editor’s note: Shore Line Newspapers Senior Editor Barbara Douglas is a certified master gardener in training with the University of Connecticut College of Agriculture and Natural Resources.

source : www.zwire.com