September, 2008: My mother was a writer and a gardener, and she had as fertile a way with words as she had with tomatoes. By the time I knew her, she had retired from acting, but she’d enjoyed a not-unlucrative career in the Thirties and Forties playing mostly bad girls on radio and writing monologues for her one-woman show out of Chicago. She met my father in the early 1940’s on the set of the “Ellery Queen” radio show, where he was a writer and she’d been cast as gentleman-detective Ellery’s secretary, Nikki Porter; they met on April Fool’s Day and were married on the Fourth of July the same year. Eight years later, they had moved to rural Connecticut with three young children and me on the way. There Mother’s gardening talents blossomed.

We had lilacs and dogwoods and forsythias. We had bleeding heart and creeping phlox. We had snowdrops, anemones, and every kind of narcissus except the Triandrus, which we did not know. We had little blue-starred Quaker ladies (Houstonia). We had delphiniums of a tall, cold blue, and delicious roses, like the blood red ‘Mister Lincoln’ and the immortal ‘Peace’. We had exquisite bearded irises that Rex Stout, my mystery novelist father’s mystery novelist pal, had given Mom. We had gladioli and dahlias in luscious colors. We had horse- and cow-poop-fed vegetable gardens that produced so extravagantly in the rich, deep, acidic Connecticut loam that one year, after canning, canning, canning till she was sick of it and there was no more room in the cellar, Mom gave away baskets of tomatoes until her neighbors flinched when they saw her coming and the dogs and my brothers had tomato fights in the backyard.

And of course Mom grew annuals. We had pansies in the spring, purchased from the Hurlbuts, our farmer neighbors across town: the plants came in wooden flats, with soil dug up from the farmyard. We had four o’clocks, which really did bloom around four o’clock each summer afternoon. We had nasturtiums, the big, wrinkly, kid-friendly seeds of which were the first garden seeds Mom taught me to plant. We had zinnias, which grew to perfection in our rich loam. We had snapdragons, too, the focus of one of my many early traumas: when I was three Mom told me they would bite me if I poked my fingertips into them (“That’s why they call them snap-dragons!”). We had tall twining ‘Heavenly Blue’ morning glories, still a favorite among flower nuts after more than a hundred years. And we had spittoonias.

That’s how Mom referred to them, I swear. She meant petunias, of course. In the Sixties they came in most of the colors available today except that washed-out, discouraged looking yellow the breeders keep trying to foist on us. I’m talking about true petunias, now, not the more vivid, smaller-flowered, alkaline-hating calibrachoas. Callies are petunias’ distant relatives, and so recently introduced to American garden centers that Mom, who died in Ireland in 1992, never knew them.

If she had, no doubt she would have come up with some weird pet name for them. Mom liked morphing the names of things. She called urban boulevards “boozy-boos”, possibly because of the late-night drunks that frequent such places. She called her big electric ironing machine — properly, a mangle — a “mangel-wurzel”, which is actually a variety of turnip. When we came upon one of the dogs on her back, legs splayed wide in the summer heat, Mom would exclaim, “Oh, Macky-Girl is freshing her air.” She called nasturtiums “nasty urshums”. She called anemones — which she knew perfectly well are properly pronounced “ah-NEM-oh-neez” — “Anna moans”. She called the screaming red annual salvias “salivas”, an appellation that has so colored my feelings toward Salvia splendens that I loathe them to this day. (Except: have you seen the new color strains, in rich, dark burgundy, and evening-glow lilac, and pink sunrise cherry cream?)

Now I know some of you are rolling your eyes and thinking, “How precious.” But Mother’s renaming of things was her way of adopting her favorite flowers into her heart. And the false naiveté suggested by the names she chose might have been her way of thumbing her nose at those who would consider her less intelligent than my summa cum laude father.

Mom never graduated from high school. She was an autodidact, that is, almost entirely self-educated. Born in 1914, she was the not-particularly-wanted younger child of a Seattle interior decorator. She grew up fatherless: Daddy Bob, my grandfather, for reasons unclear to me, abandoned his wife and daughters in 1920 and did not return until the eve of World War II. As a consequence, after her sophomore year, Mother was yanked from high school, where she had been getting a great many A’s, to go to work and help support the family. So in her spare time, she went without lunches in order to save enough money to buy books, which she read hungrily: poetry (Emily Dickinson was a favorite), history, the classics, and literary novelists of the period. When she encountered phrases she liked or words she did not know, she wrote them out in lined notebooks, some of which I still possess.

She also taught herself to write very bad adolescent poetry. But writing poetry gave her a sense of rhythm, which, when transferred to radio scriptwriting, made her monologues sing. (She was a superb actress, by the way, though her rivetingly rich alto voice made her unsuitable for playing good girls, who in the Thirties were always sopranos.)

What does all this have to do with gardening? Not much, I suppose. Except that even so-called poor gardens, like poor poems —melodramatic, overly sentimental, inharmonious, the salivas clashing with the spittoonias and the nasty urshums yelling back at them — are, if adored by their creators, still worth making. Because every act of creation, however maladroit the summa cum laudes may judge it, is a cry of love into the face of the dark. And the dark needs all the beating-back we can give it. I must go now and attend to my Anna moans.

— Copyright 2008 Rand B. Lee. Rand Lee is a garden writer and lecturer, former President & Founder of the North American Cottage Garden Society, and former Perennials Manager for Payne's North. You may contact him at Payne's South Marketing Department via telephone (505-988-9626) or email ( This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it ).