Bloomers

With spring’s blossoms and flowers opening all around me, it stirred memories from my pa; the types of favorite flowers that were favorites of friends and relatives. I know that I have mentioned in other posts about my grandmother Rebecca Rugg Miner’s favorite flower, always saying that a pansy reminded her of little boys with dirty faces. Every year a Jewish huckster would give Gram a free flat of pansies, because she would by the overripe fruit and vegetables late Friday afternoon that would spoil over the weekend. He’d sell at cost and she’d cook them up for her family or can them to eat later.

She also had her porch boxes filled with geraniums, mostly red and white. When the winter came, she’d take snippets and plant them in dirt filled soup cans. They’d line her bathroom windows all winter long, then replant them in the porch boxes come spring. I can remember their spicy, smell when I would rub a leaf.

A friend and fellow writer loves lilacs. Any color from the palest lavender to the deepest purple, as long as they are fragrant. Because she lives in an apartment, she can’t plant her own, so she cheats and plants a clematis vine. The color is right, but the aroma is missing.

My mom Sybil Miner Beck’s favorite flowers were the small blue forget-me-nots and roses. She didn’t grow the forget-me-nots, but would plant a rose cutting in the ground and cover it with a mason jar. Most often it was a pickle jar. Mason jars were kept for canning. The rose stem would take root and she would grow a new bush.

Two flowers that my wife Cindy Morrison Beck loved were daisies and a plant that looked like a yellow thistle. I can’t recall its name, but when I did research, it was a plant that grew wild in Turkey. There were two reasons Cindy likes this thistle-like plant. Number one, she rescued it. The plant was nearly when she bought it and nursed it back to life. The second reason was that her lineage was Scottish. The Morrison clan was from the Isle of Lewis in northwestern Scotland and this plant looked like a thistle without the “jaggers.” Scotland’s national flower is the thistle.

Cindy’s love for daisies was a blessing. Once they started to bloom, I would pick them from the field from behind our home as well as whatever else was blooming, and fill a vase. It made her day when she’d come home and find a vase of daisies. The blessing for me was that they were free and it took such a small gesture to make her happy. When she passed, we surrounded her with daisies and baby’s breath.