Ode To A Warm-Hearted Black Thumb

Fifteen years ago my father passed away, and at that time I wrote a column about the profound effect his gardening had on my life. Last week, after 98 wonderful years, my mother passed away. Now it’s time to say a few words on how her gardening has made its mark on my life.

My mother, Sophie, was a certified, third degree, master black thumb. She would never go out to buy a plant, but if you gave her one she would care for it as best she could. But inevitably, it would slowly wither and die.

It always struck me as being very strange that a woman married to such an accomplished horticulturist picked up none of it. And yet, the garden was a very important part of her life, as were plants.

I have no memories of her helping in the garden. It was always my father doing the digging, weeding, the planting, the spraying and the cutting of flowers to bring into the house. But, when it came to displaying the flowers, cooking the corn, making the apple pies, the blueberry and currant jams and jellies—she was always right on top of it.

I have several vivid memories of her and some are quite poignant. We grew a lot of cucumbers and at a young age I became a pickle addict. I remember in midsummer she would gather the large Mason jars, conjure up her secret pickle recipe and then stash the jars of pickles in the basement.

It wasn’t limited to cucumbers though, because at the end of the gardening season my father would gather up all the remaining green tomatoes of just the right size and mom would squeeze them into the Mason jars and pickle them as well. These too would go down into the basement where it was cool and dark and the pickles would store for months as the colder months of winter set in.

But as you may know, pickling can be a fairly precise science and errors in the processing can be very dangerous. We discovered this one evening around dinnertime. It was quiet in the house while we were having dinner and all of a sudden we were hearing explosions and horrendous thuds in the basement.

We had no clue what was going on but I grabbed a flashlight and gingerly went down the basement steps and over to the unfinished side that had a cement floor and exposed flooring joists and rafters at the ceiling. The explosions had stopped but there was an unmistakable scent of pickles.

Once the lights were on, we broke out into uncontrolled laughter as we realized that something had gone terribly wrong inside the jars of pickled green tomatoes and the lids had blown off the jars with the tomatoes being hurled up at the rafters and joists. There were smashed green tomatoes everywhere, hanging from the ceiling, shredded over the floor and stuck in every crack and crevice.

We cleaned up, but the memory, and the smell, lasted for years. After that, poor mom retired from being chief pickle meister.

She also had a superstitious streak, which manifested itself in the lawn. I remember that every once in a while I would come home from school or a friend’s house and my mother would be sitting on the lawn peering at it as if looking for lost treasure. She would spend hours like this and suddenly she’d shriek “I found one, I found one” and she’d run into the kitchen.

Her search wasn’t for a magical mushroom or buried truffle but for four-leaf clovers. When she would find one, she’d carefully wrap it in Saran wrap and stash it. My sister and I would get them as gifts, and just a few weeks ago when emptying a jar of keepsakes I found three. Still wrapped, very much intact, were my mother’s four-leafed clover presents.

The few houseplants that she had were the indestructible type. I remember a sprawling dieffenbachia that grew up to the ceiling in spite of incessant over- and under-watering. There were always a pair of pothos plants in wall pots in the dining room that continually reached for the floor. When they got too long and leggy, she simply cut them back and they would grow again. There was an asparagus fern that thrived on her neglect and even flowered every year. I remember dividing it several times as its root mass busted the pot it was in and now, some 40 years later, the progeny thrive in her living room.

There’s also a Christmas cactus that she got decades ago that has bloomed every single year—a little bit around Thanksgiving, a lot at Christmas and again a little bit at Easter. Each time it would bloom, she would call it a miracle.

All things considered, it was. But then, it was a cactus and bred for abuse.

Her stunning accomplishment though was with her African violets. For reasons I could never understand, she always had stunningly healthy, always flowering African violets.

Her very specific green thumb for violets always perplexed me until one day in her 80s she finally confided in me. It seems she would buy the violets in flower, and in no time the flowers would fade and she’d be left with lush green plants that would never flower again.

Seems she had found a shop that sold perfectly formed and shaped fake African violet flowers on wire stems and she would stick these into the pots that had only foliage. Voila, African violets in perpetual flower.

So, mom had her tricks and proved that even a confirmed black thumb can grow plants. Kind of. Bye mom. Keep growing.