Inspiration Thursday! The lessons of a garden.

It's hot as you know where around here and has been for what seems like weeks. Living in a condo, I've tried to re-create my Mother's garden in containers, but my poor plants just aren't surviving in all this heat. Sometimes no matter how much I water, the plants just don't make it.

Growing up, we had a gardener's paradise in our backyard. Our yard had once been a park, so we had a 100 year old hydrangea tree we could climb, an 8 foot tall lilac tree and flame azaleas that created a kind of fence around the yard's border. We had huge clumps of peonies and daffodils that announced the spring. There was a fish pond flanked by bowing rhododendron that when drained made a lovely "house". Stone paths wended their way through carpets of forget-me-nots, blue violets and grape hyacinth through the summer. Many summer afternoons were spent picking handfuls of violets for Mama - they didn't last more than an hour, but she would always carefully put them in a little vase and place them in her kitchen window so she could see them as she cooked.

In the midst of this,  Mama had a rock garden. Her vision was a sustainable perennial garden full of wildflowers. For years we worked to get the soil just right, the sun just right, the water just right. We'd get a beautiful clump of butterfly weed or black eyed Susan going and it would flourish for years, only to die after a particularly difficult winter. We had a lovely patch of pinks that grew on a rock for five or six years, but that too is now gone. As I'm facing the frustration of trying to keep my container flowers alive, I'm reminded of all those years in Mama's garden and the lessons I learned.

First, there's a time and a season. As much as I love the peonies and emperor iris, they don't bloom all year long. They burst in spring with their heady fragrance, riot of color and delicate petals, but the hot sun of summer is too much for their fragile hearts. They bring so much joy in their short season, but their life cycle always ends too soon for me.

Second, sometimes you have to persevere when the odds are against you. Every year, we'd start that garden with high hopes. We'd take our meager budget and pick out a few new perennials to add to our garden hoping they'd thrive, but knowing most of our good work didn't make it through the winter. Still, we faithfully weeded, dug the dirt, added the fertilizer and cared for them through one glorious season. We found the joy in doing when we didn't know whether we'd succeed in the long term.

Third, sometimes it's all in the dirt in which you're planted. Mama loves butterfly weed. Even now, we play "spot the butterfly weed" as we drive across the state. You'll see huge clumps of these vibrant orange flowers in the most bizarre places - rocky outcroppings, up the sunny side of a mountain or even growing out of gravel on the side of the road. Somehow these plants seem to thrive in these terrible, rocky soils. But put butterfly weed in a cultivated garden with rich soil, water and careful tending and it just doesn't seem to make it. We could never get it to thrive no matter how hard we tried. It came down to where you put your roots.

Mama's still working toward her dream. When I was home this spring we went again to the nursery to pick out some foxglove, delphinium and lavender. I weeded the garden to ready the soil for her planting. And even now she's struggling to keep the garden lush in August's heat. But Mama knew - because her Mother taught her too - the lessons of digging in the dirt. And I'm thankful she passed them on to me.