Our Garden in Paradise

My grandmother who adores and lives for flowers (she really should have been a florist when she was working) decided when my parents both died that she would like to make the garden hers. Her idea was that if she could see something beautiful and blooming daily, then it would give her a reason to live.

For a while though instead of it giving her a reason to live the garden put her on a roller coaster. She was happy and excited when the flowers were blooming but then she fall into the pits of despair if one died. I think we have gotten her off the roller coaster.

She took some of her investment money, money that she had never wanted to touch in case something happened to her, and she had a garden designer and arborist come in and redo the garden. My parents had liked the overgrown, tropical jungle kind of look. My grandmother wanted to remove some plants, open it up and plant hordes and hordes of flowers. I seriously am not exaggerating.

She trimmed back all the large supporting plants to just give a backdrop to lovely, heavenly sent flowers and life was good. For awhile.

The neighbours in front of us, decided that they were tired of all the overgrowth of our plants, cascading into their yard and they had their gardener cut it back. I am sure that they are thrilled with the openess and light that now fills their garden but my grandmother was in a state of frenzy, watching her private beautiful garden open up and now feel exposed with all the holes available for our neighbour to view our activities.

I told my grandmother that watching her sleep was not that exciting and I am sure that they aren't watching but she believes that it would be worthy of watching. Makes me wonder what she does in her sleep. LOL

Yesterday in one of our endless runs to the garden center, instead of just buying flowers with as little green on them as possible, she actually bought plants that don't flower and will fill in the holes created by trimming back the excess. Is there a metaphor here? Hmm I think so.