*This is an excerpt from on article that first appeared in Slow Scenes of Home magazine, linked here.
My grandmother was an avid gardener and a lover of plants. Her green thumb could coax any plant to grow, and she and my grandfather had a greenhouse for all the years I knew them. I loved that greenhouse. I can still see the geraniums on the wire tables, and feel the cool packed-dirt floor beneath my bare feet. I can smell the earthiness of green and growing things, and feel that warm, moisture-drenched air in my lungs – air that seemed to shimmer with life.
She was one of my favorite people. Though she was a quiet woman, her kitchen regularly collected neighbors and random visitors who had come to know her by way of the plants she sold. They loved to sit around her table talking to her. As I think back, I don’t remember that she did a lot of talking, though I do recall her soft voice answering them from time to time. I think she was just a really good listener.
When I was with her, I never felt the need to talk much. I just loved being with her. She had one of those nurturing, peaceful presences that invited you to linger. There was no exuberant splash or loud gaiety with her. There was just a quiet resignation to life. It was a resignation that had known pain but lived now untouched by it. She could still smile.
Russel Paige says “Green fingers are a fact, and a mystery only to the unpracticed. But green fingers are the extensions of a verdant heart.”
I think that is what I felt with her. That green thumb of hers that coaxed plants to life mirrored her verdant heart. When I was with her, I felt like one of her little geranium seedlings, stretching tiny roots down into the ground, anchoring for a future I could only feel in dim, flickering shadows.
She had this saying that I never forgot. She’d say, “Give a fifty cent plant a five dollar hole and you’ll have a five dollar plant.”
Those numbers make me smile now. To adjust for inflation, perhaps it would now be a twenty dollar plant in a fifty dollar hole?
That saying stayed with me forever, and every time I plant anything, from a seed to a tree, I find myself whispering those words. I dig the hole just a little bit deeper and mix in just a little more compost or peat moss, softening and enriching this hard red clay soil of mine just a little bit more. I smile, remembering her and missing her. I smile because she will never know how much those words of hers impacted my life.
Maybe she does know.
She died when I was nine years old. I wish I had known her longer. I wish I had known her when I was older. I wonder about the stories that lay underneath that quiet, strong presence. And I wonder where all the stories go when someone dies.
My grandmother’s greenhouse was one of the first places my little roots passed through on their way to becoming the woman I am today. I feel her memory in every greenhouse I walk through today. It rests on my shoulder like a warm presence, and I am taken back to that first greenhouse I knew and the woman who filled it with plants. It is a place and a woman who would be absent for the majority of my life. Yet it is a place and a woman who left its essence forever entwined in my psyche.
Give a fifty cent plant a five dollar hole and you’ll have a five dollar plant.
I realize now that those words of hers extended far deeper than gardening. I realize now that she lived that philosophy not only in her gardening, but in her life.
That tiny, hard-worked body housed a soul that had anchored itself deep into a place of nurture and belonging. She did not speak of it and I had no inkling of it then, but I see now that she nurtured her soul like the roots of the plants she loved. And this nurturing brought forth a woman who drew people around her without trying – a gentle umbrella in a stormy world. A woman who knew the song of roots reaching into healthy soil.
I wish I could sit at her table again, that kitchen table that drew so many people. I wish I could ask her when she first knew that those words meant more than gardening. I wish I could tell this woman the world called Emma how her words have come alive for me today.
Somehow, I think she knows.
It is the memory of my grandmother that brought meaning to the name that found me when I had no idea what to name this venture into tea. And so it is to her that I dedicate Seed of Life. This dream has been years in the making, and only came into reality in November of 2024. I could never have planned this, but November is the month of her birthday.
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