Memory gardens an easy way to remember loved ones

Several months after moving into our new house, I finally got around to unpacking the last few boxes in the basement. In the process, I found my late Nana's beloved "Goddess Rain Lamp" oil lamp from the 1970s:

I smiled as I remembered that thing hanging in the middle of her ivory-and-gold, 1970s French Provincial decor with its neoclassical statues and fake plastic greenery.

As a kid, that lamp was magic to me. The glow of a refrigerator bulb lit the heavenly heads of three toga-draped goddesses, as they looked out serenely through vertical nylon strings with beads of oil running slowly down them.

When my Nana – Dorothy Hutchurson – died in 1994. I couldn't think of anything else I wanted. So down in the basement that lamp has sat, with me not knowing what to do with it but unable to let go of it.

Then it hit me: Turn it into garden art! Yes! I would devote a small section of the back yard to my Nana, with the salmon-pink geraniums in a white urn like the one she always had:

But then the idea took on a life of its own. Possessed, I started building my own tacky shrine. I made Nana's old bone china dishes into a little garden border, set in her musical porcelain tea pot and even added one of her faux-gold adorned mirrors.:

A little over the top? Perhaps … But I sure had fun playing around with the beginnings of a memory garden for my beloved Nana. Perhaps I'll tone it down a bit, and just keep a white urn of salmon-colored geraniums around every summer in her honor. But one thing's for sure – gardens are a great way to remember belated loved ones. Who doesn't remember Grandma's old rose bushes and feel a little nostalgic, or see the same hanging basket she always had on her porch?

On the other hand, maybe I'll just keep my garden whimsical and in-your-face – maybe even add the fish pond my Grandpa had going in the back yard. After all, isn't gardening about what makes YOU happy? I know every time I look at this shrine (even if it's only in this picture, or in a hidden nook in the back of our lot), it will always make me giggle - perhaps even cry. And then I'll hug myself and whisper "I miss you, Nana…"