Gram’s garden

My grandmother and me in her garden

In Seattle’s Greenwood neighbourhood, a little red house was owned for forty years by my grandmother, Gladys Corinne Walker,  and later for fifteen years by me.

I remember a patio embraced by a pear tree and a plum tree and three camellias, one pink, one red, one white. I would play with the other children in my grandmother’s small day care center on the green painted paving stone patio surrounded by low rock walls softened by campanula, with its blue bells, and baby’s tears, with shiny tiny green leaves. Above, hanging baskets cascaded with pink, red, and white trailing fuchsias. In spring and summer, every meal in warm weather was al fresco on the old picnic table. The pear blossoms in spring would garnish the tablecloth. A cushioned wooden chaise loungue gave me a comfortable place to read for hours.

a garden tea party

I grew up surrounded by my grandmother’s many friends who often came over for garden parties and delicious dinners.  Gram’s life revolved around her home and garden, and between her tiny day care center and the taking in of ironing, she managed to spend most of her time at home.

Gram involved herself in my school, which was a block away, by sending glorious bouquets of flowers with me to my teachers, and by running a plant booth for the yearly fun fair. A succession of children passed through her day care center, and I wonder if any of them (Sally? Sandra? Trisha? Mike and Bob?) later became dedicated gardeners.

Anyone who came to visit got a tour of the garden – a mere 3000 square feet in a neighborhood near Seattle’s Green Lake – and would leave with “slips” (cuttings) of plants: African violets, hardy fuchsias, roses … and a bouquet of anything in bloom.

Letter written to her by the secretary of the PTA:

Dear Mrs. Walker,

Your many friends in the John B. Allen P.T.A. wish to express their sincere thanks for the many, many years you have devoted to our school and the lovely plants you have donated to help make our Fun Night a success.

Both you and your plants have been genuinely appreciated and we felt it was time to say “thank you”. Many a child has gone home happy because he bought his mommy a plant…whether she needed it or not, she loved it.

Thanks again for everything.

Sincerely,

Jerrolee Hendricks,
Secretary

Gram by her greenhouse, 1972

Gram in her garden, 1972

And always, Gram in motion: planting, nurturing, in her jeans and an old shirt, her small glass greenhouse neatly organized with trays of seedlings, her garden weedless and luscious with prize-winning begonias and hybrid tea roses, apricot, clear yellow, red and pink, geraniums and petunias and neat rows of lettuces and green onions, tomatoes heavy with fruit, all mixed together. Her chrysanthemums were as tall as I, and as an adult, I looked and looked for those tall chrysanthemums for my first garden before realizing that their height had been relative to my own.

Here is a photo essay about the evolution of her garden from the 1940s to the 1990.

on back porch with Skippy and Penny; I’d guess around 1945

Skippy on the back porch before the house was painted red. around 1950

Gram and my older cousin John. This shows the back yard was once lawn.

with John

Gram took great care of her things; she would have hauled this chair up the ladder into the attic for storage every winter (amazingly) and painted it every year so it is very likely the same chair that I had in the garden in the 1980s.

Gram on her perfect green parking strip, before the round paving stones were set in. I don’t remember there being a tree there when I was little, so this is pre-1955.  The lawn was so green that you could pick it out from the other side of Green Lake.

view from back porch to across the alley in snow

Gram by her greenhouse on a snowy day. That is probably my cousin John, which would put the photo in the 50s.  You can see that back then (and until I was about 18, when electricity got more expensive), she used to heat it all winter. I have a slide of bouganvillea growing in there, which must have been taken in my late teens.  Note the dog house in the background.

the greenhouse in early days…around 1950. Later it had shrubs at the front corners.

Skippy by the greenhouse on a snowy day.

Oh, how she loved Skippy.  When Skippy died, she said she would never have another cat, till a friend came to her and handed her a kitten.

Penny

Penny’s dog house was by the outdoor stairs that were the only access to the half basement. There were no shrubs yet to block the neighbour’s yard. When my grandmother first bought the house for $1500, her mortgage was $15 a month. She worked fulltime as an elevator operator at the old Federal Building and then Standard Furniture and probably did not have much time for gardening. At one point she had to ask the bank to lower her mortgage to $10 a month; she made about 20 cents an hour. Black and white photos were probably taken by my uncle, probably around 1950. She owned the house for over forty years.

Penny and Skippy. I am amazed to see that the house one lot over was NOT stucco at the time. around 1950

The house one lot over was a pretty pale peachy stucco when I was growing up, and it could not even be seen from this spot because by then there stood a hedge of lilacs.

My stepgrandfather Harry Walker with Penny.

My grandmother married young, then divorced. Her ex-husband got custody of the children by accusing her of being a wild woman. She only got them on weekends. She remarried, and stayed married for about 25 years to Harry, a fisherman. When he hit her while drinking, she divorced him. She used to tell me “I’m too damned stubborn and independent to live with a man.”

tulips in my grandmother’s garden; photo probably by her grandson, John, or perhaps by her son, Al.

me on the front parking strip, probably 1958

The house with the shed dormer across the street was owned by a fascinating woman named Mrs. Lamoreaux. She still lived there when I bought the house in 1980 but unfortunately not for long; I was just getting to know her liberal, literate personality as a grown up when she died.

My grandmother began to garden every inch of the property when she began working from home around the time I was born.  She had previously worked as an elevator operator.  She lost her job when arthritis prevented her from standing all day; the bosses would not let her sit on a stool in the elevator.  After that, she made a living with some gardening and some housecleaning, and when I was born she became a childcare provider with a small daycare in her house and supplemented that income by taking in ironing.

This was her view from her drop-down ironing board.

wisteria off the back porch

Two daycare children by the front rockery. By now the house 2 lots up was stuccoed.

the rockery in bloom, mid 60s. Lots of Seattle rockeries featured this “basket of gold” and purple aubretia.

Front garden, looking east toward Green Lake. Every year, she planted this bed of geraniums in the front garden.

looking down the hill from the path of lawn…Gram grew a neat patch of pink and red geraniums backed with a line of roses. I often wish she had been alive during our present day richness of plant selection. mid 60s.

Tulips filled that spot in springtime.

azaleas in front garden, mid 1960s

She entered her plants in flower show competitions.  I remember that from when I was little, although by the time I was in school she had stopped competing.

first prize

prize winning gloxinia ready to go to the flower show

“orchid cactus”

front garden in the 60s (torn photograph)

Gram in her front garden. mid 60s, “the rockery”

She loved that hydrangea next to the steps and put rusty nails under it to help make it blue.  There is a big rock right next to the stairs to the sidewalk.  Every evening in summer, she sat on that rock to hose water her sloping parking strip lawn.

Gram and her cat, Squeaky (Skippy’s successor) on the steps by the sidewalk, by the “watering rock”.

Squeaky on the warm front walkway, mid 60s

Gram and Squeaky in back yard. I think the house looks brown instead of red because she may have been sanding and doing paint prep; she painted the house herself every few years, and had a problem with paint bubbling on the shade back yard wall. (Or maybe it is just a faded photo.)

 Gram kept the garden perfect despite having up to 5 children at a time in her daycare. One time I said I had found a weed and no one believed me till I proved it; a dandelion had snuck up through the inside of the shrub. My finding that weed became a family legend. Here, in the living room, one of the daycare groups: Cindy Holmes, me, Sandy Blair, Jeff Holmes.

Inside the house, there was always a vase of flowers from spring till autumn.

March 1964.

Hooking rag rugs was one of her winter hobbies.  She called the circle hooked rug the  “pie plate” pattern, and the stripey one was “hit and miss”.  When she had lots of different left over colours, she would make a hit and miss rug…fast and easy.

hibiscus Christmas tree

Every Christmas, she would decorate her blooming hibiscus tree. Note tv tray with Christmas cookies. While I was growing up, I and the other children in her small daycare decorated Christmas cookies every year. The brown chair fabric was so soft and silky to the touch…and I now have that needlepoint chair, the one with the purse on it.

Gram and her dear friend Mary Alice in front of the hibiscus Christmas tree.

below: her hibiscus in bloom by the front window; I used to have that white china Madonna figurine in my garden here, but it froze and broke one winter. It is on a glass shelf behind the hibiscus. Not miraculously floating in air.

Christmas 1963; you can just see some her trays of African violets to the right. My mother had offspring of those same violets with her at Golden Sands Assisted Living.

Gram in her springtime garden. I eventually took out this upper patch of lawn and made a path angled across to the left.

springtime. She had added the windowboxes and shutters to the house.

The back garden had three big camellias, red, pink, and white.

east side of house, fuchsia windowboxes. She wintered over her tender fuchsias and geraniums under lights in the basement.

fuchsia windowbox

She lowered that bamboo blind every morning to keep the morning sun from scorching her African violets on a table inside. She had a sign at the beginning of this side of the house that read “Follow the fuchsia trail to….” and then as one entered the back garden another sign read “…The Enchanted Forest”.

To anyone who visited, she offered “slips” (cuttings) of her fuchsias.

One of my grandmother’s best friends, May Lancaster, in “The Enchanted Forest”. On any warm evening, Gram served dinner al fresco on that picnic table.

Brugmansia (which she called datura, but I think now this was Brugmansia), wintered over every year in the house. Its fragrance drifted around the back patio in summer.

one of her prized Christmas catci. She lined them up on a shelf along the back wall of the house.

Roses were another favourite plant, mostly growing in the sunny south end of the back garden.

roses and delphiniums

painting of pansies which I believe was done by my grandmother.

How she loved pansies and their “little faces”.

She grew and canned tomatoes, pears and plums from her trees, cucumbers (for pickles); she also canned raspberries from down the street, apple jelly, more pickles (for which she bought cucumbers), beets (which she probably grew), and more.

Gram on the path by the greenhouse, 1972

working in the garden, about age 75

Gram’s garden tools in autumn leaning on the pear tree; she would have carefully put them away each night.

She loved her “little red house” so much that she made a cake representing it..Or my cousin George and his partner Bob may be the ones who made it.

back view of house cake in progress.

I think it was being constructed in my cousin’s kitchen as this fancy counter was not at my grandmother’s house. It may have been a birthday surprise from George and Bob. She refused to cut into it, as I recall, and kept it until it fell apart, as cakes do.

Below:  side view of the house cake…with window box, and little ladder going up to back roof (where a door led into the attic rooms; later I had an interior stair/ladder put in). This also was not in Gram’s house, further evidence that cousin George made the cake! I think this is at my uncle’s house, and look, it seems like maybe they had a back up cake as they probably guessed that she would not eat the little red house cake! You can see the trellis, the back windows, kitchen window, living room window with window box and the high-up piano window are all perfect.

Gram was pleased to find this clipping years after first painting her house bright red.

She hooked this rug which represents the neat geometrical shapes of her garden beds and upper lawn.

Later when I owned the house and had taken out all the lawn, I hooked a rug showing its wilder state.

I bought the house in 1979 from my family after my grandmother went into a nursing home; she died in 1980.

March of 1988; I don’t remember why but I got the inspiration to dig up the parkingstrip and make a garden. No one else on my block had done so; in fact, it was still a rare thing in Seattle. I think I was inspired by Ann Lovejoy’s columns in The Weekly.

April 88 with my cat, Valene. By then, I had planted two trees in the parking strip.

parking strip July 88

April 1988, rockery (bank of garden in front of the house by the sidewalk; my grandma had made it, including acquisition of the big rocks). I had changed it from annuals to perennials.

April 1988… I had dug up the upper patch of lawn by now. The hydrangea and the watering rock are still there.

August 1988

Parking strip, August 88 with geraniums, statice, gloriosa daisies, zinnias, dahlias, nasturtiums, cosmos.  I think my grandmother would have approved of the colour.

parking strip, summer 1990. Although this is all more sophisicated, looking back I think it was more beautiful the previous year with the riot of annual colour!

I carried on Gram’s fuchsia tradition.

And put her name on the back gate of my new fence in 1990.

winter 1989; I had replaced an azalea with black bamboo.

winter 1989. The greenhouse had fallen into disrepair under my watch.

back garden summer 1989

a friend in the back garden, 1990

summer 1990, Gram’s hydrangea is still there.

front porch summer 1990

front garden summer 1990

I moved to the Long Beach Peninsula on December 24, 1992, and sold my grandmother’s house in 1994.  I often wish I had been able to afford to keep it.  In my first garden on the Peninsula (at the Sou’wester Lodge), I put a sign in her memory.

I still live surrounded her things: needlepoint chairs, dishes, hooked rugs, and not a day goes by that I don’t think of her and miss her.