Time in a Garden: Grieving in the garden
My brother’s memorial service was last month. He was my only sibling and with his loss, I felt the last flesh-and-blood ties to my childhood slipping away.
While he wasn't a gardener and his ashes were scattered at sea, I found myself thinking about the many ways in which gardens over the years have kept precious memories of our loved ones alive.
Traditionally cemeteries have been created in garden settings: appropriate since the Eden-like landscape is a comforting reminder of new life growing in the face of death and loss. Since childhood, I would go along with family members who made an annual pilgrimage on Memorial Day to plant geraniums and other long-blooming annuals on the grave sites. Sad in our practical day and age, the flowers are now artificial to save on maintenance by cemetery staff.
Memorial gardens for ashes provide a quiet, reflective setting for loved ones to walk or sit and reflect on peaceful memories of those we have lost. Some set the mood with only white flowering plants; others limit the flowers’ colors to cool tones like white, violet, blue or mauve.
Still others encourage a wild and cheerful color palette that creates a sense of joy amid our grieving. And in some cases, the garden designer chooses a single plant species like roses or hostas.
Several years before my mother’s death, we made a point of taking some of the plants from her Wisconsin garden to our Michigan home — an act of love that she as well as we cherished. Today those plants live on in my Petoskey garden as a daily reminder of her deep love of gardening and her resilient and caring spirit as a gardener over the decades.
And so as I mourn my brother's loss, I find myself contemplating ways to honor his memory in those same gardens of mine. Make it symbolic, one website suggests. Thoughtful engraved stepping stones or garden art that draws on our loved one’s interests are both possibilities. A bench can create a space to contemplate. And water features add peaceful sounds to this private place of reflection. Lighting adds yet another dimension.
It occurred to me that I had already begun to create such a quiet spot last summer when my husband and I installed a tiny pond with lantern lights on a shepherd’s hook at the bottom of our yard, along with a small pad of pavers on which to install seating. Even as I grieve, I look to those modest beginnings to personalize the area somehow in the growing season ahead — inspired with that beautiful hymn about love that comes again like wheat that springeth green.
My brother and I shared those experiences and images of the greens emerging from the barren earth in the Midwest of our childhood. I find in them an intense sense of hope and new beginnings.
This article originally appeared on The Petoskey News-Review: Time in a Garden: Grieving in the garden
