The Flower Farm

I got interested in gardening when a friend, who had for years been trying to talk me into it, finally said, “Just try it. You’ll love it, it’s very creative.” I guess those were the magic words because that’s when I fell hard and fast. Since that first tiny garden that Mark dug for me for Mother’s Day years ago, I have made many mistakes and still do. I fall in love with things that won’t work in our zone, that need too much attention, that are planted in the wrong spot, that wither and die in the summer heat. Every year is a new experiment.

This same friend took me out to a place in the boonies called The Flower Farm. It was a real working farm and the husband and wife who owned it knew everything. The husband was always working on the flowers and the wife worked with the customers. You could pick her brain about something and she’d have dozens of ideas to consider. The creative energy of the two of them was inspiring, and every time I came home from there I wanted to be a flower farmer in the worst way.

One time I bought a plant from them called Kiss Me Over The Garden Gate. It is one of those old-fashioned flowers that reseeded everywhere – eventually from the front yard to the back and Mark never cared that it ended up among his tomatoes and peppers. He loved the tall, wispy pink flowers that would bloom at the top. Every year he’d forget what they were called and when I’d tell him he’d say, “Oh yeah, what a great name for a plant.” I also bought an oregano plant from her that was invasive so I pulled it out, but to this day (twenty years later) it keeps coming back and coming back.

After a few years of going to the Flower Farm every spring, they abruptly closed when the husband ended his life. It was a shock to everyone who went there, and his wife could not manage those acres of flowers and herbs on her own so the business was shut down. Or maybe she just didn’t want to do it without him. It felt like undone sympathy to me. I wanted to say goodbye and to thank her for introducing me to so many flowers from a different time, to say I was so sorry about her husband. Her husband’s suicide was only the second time in my life that I knew of that kind of death. The first was the father of one of my classmates in grade school. He owned a pizza place, and because they were Catholic it was the only place my parents ever ordered from on the rare occasions when my mom didn’t cook. After it happened, I overheard my mom say to my dad, “That selfish man,” and that was not what I expected to hear about someone my parents knew well. At twelve years old it was so sad to me that John’s dad was dead, but it was eclipsed by the nature of his death which seemed to me to make everyone mad.

From a distance that kind of death is awful and always should be. From up close it is horrific and I am stunned multiple times a day that Mark died the way he did. I have never been more confused about anything in my life. Some things I have figured out, some I never will. Grief, uncertainty, and regret have become demanding bedfellows. I want to kick them out every night, and sometimes I am successful, but they come back for another round the next night and the next.

I don’t know how the guy who owned the flower farm died. It doesn’t matter. He and his wife created something beautiful and shared it with everyone. All these years later I can close my eyes and see that place, and it makes me long for the time in my life when the sadness will be overshadowed by all that was before the end.

Mark was a summer kind of guy and in my second year without him I endure these long, lonely days by going outside to dig, split, plant, weed, and water. And every day I look for what’s invasive so it doesn’t take over what is trying to grow and haunt my nights.