Thinking of gardening - memories

This is an excerpt from an e-mail letter I sent to a friend and I am putting it here because it inspired two memories of gardening from my teen years:

How wonderful to grow things: "the force that through the green fuse drives the flower...." One phrase from my favorite Dylan Thomas poem. That force is what I think of as God - the force of new life, productive living manifestation of expansive energy, the energy of the universe.

I have only one gardening memory: When my family first moved to New Jersey from Philadelphia, my parents were "garden" intoxicated. Like me, they had grown up in the brick canyons of the city and now we had a house with a big yard on a gently sloping hill in the back. Our development had been built on a farmers land and the development ran down to a Creek - a filthy black water mysterious place (to me). So my father got a tiller and tilled the slope behind the house and planted a victory garden - beans, tomatoes, potatoes, onions, carrots - the works! You know New Jersey is known as the Garden State, although now we just grow housing developments where farm fields once were. So all my father's things grew like crazy. I was enthralled by the myriad of peculiar and huge insects that were drawn to the garden - giant fat tomato worms, multicolored gleaming beatles of all kinds. I was deep into reading organic gardening journals and begged my father to go organic and not use pesticide. He agreed and I sent away to CHINA for a preying mantis cocoon to fight nature with nature.

It arrived and we put it in a corner of the garage. One day a small living ladder emerged and the tiny single file army marched out to the garden. What astonishing creatures! Fearless. I loved them! But they weren't enough and I tried to pick off the bad beatles that were eating my father's plants. First I crushed them, then I drowned them and finally I began to have nightmares from the murder. My father had to go back to pesticides. The preying mantises weren't enough.

My mother and father worked like crazy in the hottest end of the summer sterilizing Ball jars and putting up all the produce - pickles from the cucumbers, tomato relish, and my father built a pantry under the 2nd story steps to house the treasure.

I don't know how many years this went on because I was in my teens and already working and had saved enough to leave home and get my own apartment. My mother also had a rock garden on that slope, but that's another story.

Here is the story that goes with the rock garden. My mother, with my father's help, worked tirelessly on her rock garden on the slope behind our new house on Roland Avenue. It was the trend of the decade, the Rock Garden! I don't know exactly where they got the rocks, but I remember one rock we got from the dumps in Philadelphia.

My Grandmother Lavinia Lyons lived on Tenth street at Oregon AVenue in Philadelphia. That pre and post World War 2 neighborhood was built just north of an ancient settlement called Stonehouse Lane. Early in the 1700's and perhaps even before, new immigrants from Germany in particular, had drained the swamp along the Delaware River and created canals. On the land between the canals, they built rough little houses and raised goats, pigs, chickens and cows and on the rich aluvial soil from the Delaware, they grew crops of produce which they then took in horse drawn wagons up to the neighborhoods and sold in the alleyways between the streets. Behind each street, say 10th Street, each house had a small garden lot and between the back garden lots ran an alleyway wide enough for a horse drawn wagon. The hucksters came down the alleys and the housewives came out and picked out their carrots and potatoes and the huckster weighed them in his big hanging metal scale. This memory is so vivid to me because of the horses! As a small city child, I had never seen such creatures - enormous and immpressive with huge heads, large liquid brown eyes and gently chewing velvet lips, gnawing constantly on the bit between their teeth. Whenever I was at my grandmother's I ran out into the alley to see the horses with the hucksters.

Between the declining Stonehouse Lane village which had thrived in the 1800's but was under attack in the 1900's from municipal development, there was a huge dump. Perhaps it arose from a landfill. In those non-ecological days, people threw whatever trash they had into the swamps then covered them and built on them. At this dump there were refrigerators, household items of all kinds, and in season, Christmas trees for sale!

My parents had gone to the dumps on many occasions not only to buy Christmas trees, but also to find usable furnishings - once, a medicine cabinet for the bathroom that was in perfect condition, probably the victim of a bathroom modernization.

On a visit with her mother, my mother decided to take Grandmom, me, and Sue (mother's yougest sister) on a ride to the dump to get a ROCK for her Rock gardent. At the time there was a good bit of construction going on down there, the new airport, a naval shipyard where the old WW2 ships were parked, and highways!

My mother spied the rocks she wanted and in her excitement, she left the car, Grandmom in the front seat me (around 12) and Susan (around 15) in the back seat, but she forgot to put on the emergency brake!

the car began to slowly roll forward. My grandmother called ou tin a panic! We in the back yelled put on the brake! Grandmom who had NO experience with cars whatsoever didn't know one pedal from another and she put her foot on the gas! We drove off into the dump screaming and my mother running vainly after us! The doors were open, I think we were hoping to make a jump escape and th car was careening and bumping over stuff and falling into holes! Grandmom seemed unable to take her foot off the gas, she was in shock. We were saved when the car rose up and mounted a huge tree trunk and became lodged there! My mother caught up to us.

I can't remember now how my mother got to a phone to get us rescued, I only remember my father marveling at this disaster when he came and got us. My Grandmother Lavinia Lyons, always a kind of nervous and frail woman, was traumatized! I remember my mother plaintively trying again and again to explain to my father about the rock she wanted for the rock garden.

note: one of my father's most notable attributes was his loyalty and devotion to my mother and vice versa. His reaction was a mostly benign combination of marvel and humor and prolem solving. It is worth noting that my mother had a car, of her own, at a time when no other women we knew drove or had licenses or cars. My mother had learned to drive during the war as a courier at the Philadelphia Navy Yard. She had driven a jeep.

Stonehouse lane was eventually obliterated by the latter 1950's and exists only in the essays and memories of historians of Philadelphia and those of us still living who remember the hucksters and the produce and the horses. It has been said that a number of Hessian deserters from the Revolutionary War took refuge amongst their German counterparts in the Stonehouse Lane settlement. It may be true!

Happy Trails! wrightj45@yahoo.com