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…"
Comments
memory garden
Hi there, and thanks for visiting Your Easy Garden! Not sure what you mean by "plants by name" but I would think that if the garden is a personal thing, in the memory of a particular person - or perhaps just a nostalgic memory - it could be a plant you associate with them or perhaps even a tree that looks like them (tall and willowy or short and thick). Or, you could have any garden and make it into a theme that represents that person (ie. my grandma and her decorating style or perhaps if that person loved purple, you could do an all-purple garden. Or, perhaps if someone died of breast cancer, you could plant a pink-bloomed plant (a la the Susan G. Komen foundation) in their memory. Please let me know if you'd like more ideas.
memory garden
loved your idea.
what plants would especially by name fit into a memory garden?
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