I finally put the flowers in the compost

A tall vase of chrysanthemums--bright green button mums among fringier-petaled gold, yellow, burgundy, and lavender mums--stood in my living room since the day before my parents left in September. Chrysanthemums remind my family of the October day when Markus and I got married (October 31, 1992). We decorated church, reception, and wedding cake with many colored mums. For a glance back, see the November 3, 2002 entry on Simon's Place. Be sure to click on the wedding photo to open a photo gallery that shows the mum-inspired color scheme in my wedding dress. In 2002, we celebrated ten years. This year we are approaching 22.

I remember the last day of my parents' trip, a Thursday, as a busy one. In the morning, I drove with my mother into Heilbronn, where she purchased a waffle iron as a gift for Miriam's birthday. Along the way, we saw a gorgeous outdoor flower display, and she bought the mums as a gift for us. I arranged them in a vase, remembering the dozens of chrysanthemums I bought back in 1992 to study for color while designing my dress. I even carried them into department stores and held their petals next to bolts of colorful raw silk.

After lunch at our place in Flein, we piled in the car to meet up with Markus' parents in Stuttgart. Then we drove south to the University of Hohenheim for a tour around the Botanical Garden. It was a rainy tour, but we held our umbrellas and kept walking until we reached the end of the garden with Simon's tree. Markus' parents had sponsored the tree in Simon's memory soon after his death. Ten years later, the zelkova serrata (Japanese elm) has suffered some setbacks and lost branches to extreme winter cold. Nonetheless, we found it and looked under the foliage long enough to uncover the sign. It's a spunky little tree. Here's a map of the garden and some photos of our visit.

Botanical Garden in Hohenheim. The purple pin (bottom left) indicates the approximate location of Simon's tree.

To find Simon's tree, you walk south from the Schloß (red pin above). Eventually you pass the lavender labyrinth and continue to an open meadow descending a hillside. At the bottom is a gathering of trees. Simon's is the small one in the middle (below) with touches of orange color.

Simon's tree viewed from the meadow.

Simon's tree

The botanical marker

Four who slogged through the wet meadow to the tree:
Ann Craig, Irmgard Vodosek, Mary Craig
(and Markus Vodosek behind the camera)

Miriam with all four grandparents

Our busy day ended with dinner out at Bella Vista, a restaurant on the top level of a luxury high rise. The view was indeed incredible, even under cloudy skies. A fitting last day for my parents' 12-day trip. The next morning I took them to the airport. Their flight was on September 12th.

And so my brain ticked through things as I snipped the flower stalks today to fit them into the kitchen compost. Just how long had those chrysanthemums lasted? I back-dated from my parents' departure date. The day before, when my mom bought the flowers, was September 11th.

September 11th. How odd. I don't remember thinking this year about the anniversary of 9/11. Not the day of. It was the kind of busy day when I don't listen to the radio, don't glance at a paper, where surely even in Germany the date would have been mentioned. But for me the day passed by.

I guess those flowers lasted about three weeks. I guess one day you notice you haven't thought about an anniversary you'd thought would never lose its power. I guess you can get that busy with your own life.

Deadheading (flash post)

I think (in the garden)

therefore I blog

Today's project: cutting back the dried up blooms in my flower bed before they go all the way to seed. The practice, known as deadheading, is one I learned from my mother, who found she could assign me to the pansy bed and ask me to pinch off the wilted flower heads with their thin stems. Pansies, she told me, are called "little kitten face" in Chinese. Sometimes I filled tiny vases with pansy bouquets. Generally, I objected less strenuously to this task than to others, such as yanking out the ivy runners infiltrating the lawn to prune them back. "If that's so important to you," I spat in preteen indignation, "then do it yourself!" (The line requires exiting at a run. Apparently, I still feel a little bad about it.) 

My mother's connection to China goes back to her birth in Suzhou, where her parents served as Methodist missionaries until they fled the Japanese invasion in 1939. Her connection to deadheading comes from her father, primarily, who gardened in the yard around my grandparents' Tenafly, New Jersey home. The deep, shady backyard was a late spring paradise of blossoming dogwood, impatiens, azalea, and rhododendron: white, pink, salmon, and red against lush green and delicate tree bark.

My main backyard activity in Tenafly was the trolly swing Gramp hung across the full width of the yard behind the house between two tall trees. With handles and a seat, the trolley hung as a vertical line from a metal wire and ran on two grooved wheels, making a squealing noise as the rider went forward toward the opposite tree at high speed and backwards, slighly more slowly, to the start. At that point we had to hop off and give the next sibling or cousin a turn to climb up the step ladder and hop on. 

The other backyard pleasure was a cloth hammock strung between two trees perfectly distant from one another. Alone, or with a companion, we rocked back and forth. We played ship. We wrapped ourselves completely within the darkness of the fabric and let ourselves be flipped round and round from the outside. Over time, Gramp noticed we had caused the sturdy S-hooks to bend out of shape.

I expect we ate corn on the cob and spat watermelon seeds into the bushes. I bet we played tag and croquet. But what I remember is the trolly, the hammock, and the impressionist painting look of the grove of blooming bushes and trees in early summer.

The point of deadheading, according to Gramp as my mother tells it, is "to frustrate the plant." That is how you keep it blooming, keep it working toward its reproductive mission. Even my snail-nibbled, mildewed yellow coreopsis will bloom longer after I've trimmed these browned stubs back.

Coreopsis, pre-deadheading.

Gramp also advised removing suckers from plants, like the side branches on tomato plants that steal energy from the primary fruit-bearing stems. They look a little like a new arm trying to grow out of an armpit. The biggest pumpkin plant has a few suckers already, but I'm leaving them alone. The plants are tenuous this year. Maybe that would be an argument for eliminating side spurs. At this point, I'm eager to see survival, so I will let them be. Ten years ago, in the inaugural summer of Simon's pumpkin, the ur-pumpkin was already bigger than a softball by mid-July. There's still time before the fall frosts, of course, but I'd say this is the week for these plants to act like the garden is all theirs.

The biggest pumpkin plant, growing one leaf at a time.