- Author: Kelly Mae Heroux
We gardeners love our gardens for more than just their visual beauty. Gardening provides opportunity to engage with nature, creativity, and purpose. It connects us to the seasons, to the scheme of generation, to time. We cherish the fruits they bear, the bouquets they offer, and still so much more.
My parents have a memorial garden. It is not for fruit nor bouquet, but rather reflection and remembrance. You enter through a trellised gateway and follow a winding path of pavers to a bench at the far end. There's a big forsythia (Forsythia x intermedia) at the gate and clusters of astilbe (Astilbe chinensis) and sedum (Hylotelephium spectabile) throughout. There are also a lot of bulbs and rhizomes, some of which, with the forsythia, are the first to bloom in spring, a welcomed burst of color against the winter-worn landscape.
Today, the grape hyacinths my mom and I planted in the memorial garden are a deep, bold purple against muted brown. A poignant symbol of life's enduring cycles. When these bulbs divide, the offsets are sometimes called daughter-bulbs, echoing the timeless connection between generations. In a few days, we will place my grandmother's ashes in the garden, her memory joining its ever-growing tapestry. The gifts in the garden, like life, are seemingly endless.