I had to smile to myself when I stepped out into my garden this morning. The old poppy plant that I once declared war on is coming back again -- newly green and glistening and tougher than ever.
It was one of the first things I planted when we moved into our house on the lower Avenues nearly 13 years ago.I'd always admired poppies in other people's gardens, and I wanted one in my own. Along with irises and peonies, they remind me of my childhood and those warm restless days of spring when school was almost over and there was sun to spare for a bike ride after supper.
At first the poppy gave me huge pleasure with its hairy green-silver leaves and its crepe paper petals that revealed a center of blackest blue as they opened slowly each day. I loved watching the flowers bob on the surface of a breeze like vermilion birds, and I complimented myself for being brilliant enough to plant something so incredibly wonderful.
But after a few years I grew tired of my large dopey poppy. I was reading books by Penelope Hobhouse and Gertrude Jekyll and getting all snooty about garden design. I was Her High and Mighty Garden Snootress, in fact, and I was suddenly offended by the poppy's careless placement in my border, as well as the way its violent cinnabar color clashed with the tasteful roses I had recently planted now that I was a tasteful gardener.
So I took my shovel and dug it up and threw its big leafy carcass on the garbage.
"Goodbye, poppy," I said, and I wasn't sorry.
Next spring, there was a little surprise waiting for me after the snows melted and the garden started up again. The poppy was there.
I'm back," it said, "like the mad monk Rasputin."
And it kept coming back, too. Spring after spring. Until I realized one bright, breezy morning that I actually liked it again. Who can resist something as happy as a poppy after all? Now when I see it sending up its first green leaves, I look forward to the first flowering -- an unexpected gift I don't really deserve.
This morning as I checked the poppy's progress, I thought of my grandmother. Before she died, she made herself a brand new garden and filled it with starts of her favorite perennials -- the kind that take several seasons to develop before rewarding the gardener with much of a show. She knew, of course, she might never see what her garden would become with time, but she didn't care. Like me, she preferred the old-fashioned plants -- irises and peonies and lily of the valley.
And poppies, of course.
So she was willing to take that risk and lay out her new garden exactly the way she wanted to.
The last time my grandmother and I were together, I was so angry with her I could barely say good-bye. Ken and I were loading up the U-Haul, on our way to New York for a year, and she was so busy telling me what to do and how to do it, I thought I would I start running half-crazed through the streets of Salt Lake City.
My grandmother was a good woman, but she was not a mild one, and the plain truth is that although I loved her, she was often hard for me to be around, especially when she started organizing my life for me, as well as my cupboards. At times like those, I wished with all my heart she'd return to her garden and leave me in peace.
We'd only been in New York for a few months when we received the news that my grandmother was dying. I never saw her again.
In the years since her death I have wished, of course, that I could change the nature of our last parting. I think this is only to be expected.
What does surprise me, however, is that the memory of that bad day grows dimmer with each new spring. What returns, instead, are the green memories, happy and full of hope, like unexpected gifts that perhaps I don't deserve, but that I do hold close.