If we're lucky, from time to time, something touches our life that transforms a moment into a lifelong memory.
Whether a person, place or pet, such happenings become a part of the story of our lives. For me, it occurs more often with plants than anything else. Many of my firsts were while visiting a botanical garden, plant nursery, or in the gardens of friends. Some meetings were clearly love at first sight. Others took a bit more time for the attraction to be fully realized.
Curiously, it is often the circumstances of the discovery that hold more long-lasting appeal than the object itself. I’ve met some extraordinary gardeners in my work and am frequently awed by the broad knowledge and love of plants they share. One such person, a gardener for most of her considerable lifetime, tends a plot that her parents started at the end of the KoreanWar. During each visit, I am shown new plants and learn more about her fascinating life as we walk through the array of plants and layers of history.
I have a few transplants of her groundcovers now, and look forward to pointing them out during tours of my own gardens. My first true infatuation, at about age 12, was with a genus of plants known as Rhododendrons. My parents were crazy about them, and this acorn didn’t fall far from their tree. The folks were long-standing members of the American Rhododendron Society, and I accompanied them to its meetings and annual plant sales. It wasn’t long before I joined the ranks and shared the passion of the faithful.
One particular species that captured my parents’ hearts, and became a part of family lore, was a yellow-flowering variety known as “Mary Fleming”. Like another family favorite, Angel Wing seashells from Sanibel Island, Florida, sightings of a ‘Mary’ were as rare as finding an intact wing among scattered shards along a sandy beach. Either one would be announced with great pride and satisfaction—accompanied by exact locations, dimensions and comparisons to previous finds.
Our curiosity about the woman blessed with such an unusual plant as her namesake reached its peak in the pre-Google world of the 1970s, yielding only snippets of undocumented information. The ensuing decades since the lapse of my Society membership did not reduce the desire for more information on this now-mythical woman ingrained into my family’s history.
Years later, in a fortunate stroke of serendipity, I was called to an interesting older property, in Upper Nyack, for a landscape consultation. While walking the grounds, enjoying its unusual and mature plantings, I was listening to my client explain the history of the place and found it especially interesting that a well-known horticulturist had owned and planted the property in the late 1950s and ‘60s.
Her name was Mary Fleming,