Mothers and Gardens
Figuring out why mothers are so obsessed with gardens
We’ve lived in the house I grew up in all of my adolescent and teenage life. We were happy there, stable. As time went on, we started to dabble in the thought of moving but that quickly became the kind of talk that nothing ever comes of. The exterior hasn’t changed all that much, other than the size seemingly shrinking as I’ve grown over the years, reaching the very average height of 5"4 which continues to feel taller than it is.
The interior on the other hand has seen its fair share of change. New colours, concepts and trends, wallpaper to paint, back to wallpaper to different wallpaper, the rearrangement of furniture just because it’s a Sunday and there’s not much else to do. It’s an ongoing process creating your dream house, really. I don’t think there’s supposed to be an end result; we’d get bored. Our minds create new dreams when we’re done with our old ones.
One part of our home that was left untouched growing up was the garden. It’s hard to understand why, it being where the summers of my youth were spent; learning to swim in our paddling pool, riding my bike around the decking, Swing Ball competitions, losing every game of table tennis but being surprising good at basketball for a child of my height. It was primarily ours — ours being the children of the household.
The challenge was deemed too big to recreate our garden for a number of reasons. There was too much grass to ever maintain it the way our next door neighbour perfected their significantly smaller freshly cut garden. My parents were too preoccupied being parents, we were a bit of a handful and we didn’t live the idyllic suburban life where gardens resemble the ones in films like Edward Scissorhands and The Truman Show.
Our garden wasn’t a complete disaster. It wasn’t adored nor was it neglected. It had grass, patio and a decking. A few too many rockeries, sunbeds with permanent cobwebs and a broken parasol that nobody cared enough about to attempt to fix. It had potential, we just never got around to it.
Gardens weren’t my mother’s calling. She had many other callings, sports, cooking a mean Spaghetti Bolognese, choosing the right clothes for a child as fussy as me, but gardens just wasn’t one of them. Gardens belonged to my aunt — ever since I can remember they have been her pride and joy. I understood this, having an elder sister myself. Once siblings find their calling, they take ownership of it, in a protective kind of way. Sibling rivalry is real, and my relationship with my sister went like this: ‘this is mine, that is yours’ and if you ever dared try to share one another’s life calling, it felt like your identity had been ripped out of your soul. This probably stems from the innate fear that we are not good enough and somebody else may in fact be better than us at something that’s important to us. When you’re young and aren’t sure who you are yet, this insecurity is even stronger.
But my mother, being the ballsy kind of woman that she is, after turning a landmark age that I will refrain from stating, didn’t seem to care whether or not her and her sister shared the same calling and began spending more and more of her time in the garden. It wasn’t noticeable at first, it happened naturally. A few different colours here and there, the grass began to look healthier, that kind of thing.
It wasn’t until I returned home from university one weekend to notice something was missing that I started to take her new hobby seriously. I couldn’t put my finger on it what was different at first, but then it hit me — my childhood play centre had vanished completely. What was once essentially my own pride and joy was now an empty space that couldn’t be differentiated from any other part of the garden. This marked the beginning of my mother’s infatuation to make our garden with our home. Like the inside of our home, the garden has seen some odd décor choices since its revamp begun, most notably the use of our old bidet as a plant pot.
Overall though, the garden has become my mother’s pride and joy. In the place of the play centre now boasts our beloved vegetable patch, the decking gets repainted what seems an awful lot, and accessories that complement the scene are all in place. I nag at her for the amount of time she spends in the garden centre and how many times she repeats the question “What do you think of the ferns?” but I secretly admire the love she has developed for something that was once so neglected.
After my initial dismay for the play centre incident, enlightenment arrived. The abolishment of what was essentially my childhood was a literal way of saying goodbye to it and welcoming a new chapter — adulthood. Gardens are a place of peace and tranquillity and in the words of my mother, “a nice place to be after two decades of looking after you”. But I see through her potentially offensive words, because even though I’m all grown up now, my mother is still a mother, and like all mothers, has a lot of attention and affection to give. The child haven that was once my garden is now her creative outlet. By giving something I cherished a new lease of life, I said goodbye to my childhood and began the rest of my life.
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