Dear Pansies that Grew in My Grandmother’s Garden,
I have several pansy plants in my garden now. The flowers are purple, yellow, orange, maroon, blue. The fact that I have them is largely thanks to you all – I have always loved you but even more so because of how our grandmother let us cut your flowers when we visited her.
I was thinking about that when I deadheaded my pansies last night. I always have mixed feelings about pulling off the withered blooms. Each one seems precious and it seems cruel to break their slender stalks. But my grandmother used to let my sister and I go out into the garden with scissors and cut flowers to make small bouquets for jam jars and she would say, “The more you cut the more will bloom.” I always admire the closely lapped leaves at the base of the plant and the small, furled blooms readying to open. And I remember how it felt almost magical to go out into the flowers after dinner, when the light was looser but still not gone, and return to the living room, the coffee and the evening news, with fistfuls of pansies and the smell of outside on our skin.
I have thought of giving my own kids scissors and letting them assemble bouquets – but for whatever reason I haven’t. Maybe just like we never did that at home, it was something we did only at our grandparents’ house. It just wouldn’t be the same. The magic didn’t extend that far.
You’re long gone now, Pansies, of course. That part of the garden is gone. That’s OK.
Whenever I hang my towels outside to dry they smell just like the laundry my grandmother dried in the drying room alongside their garage. Something in the air is the same, maybe, not quite, but enough, something in the ritual. And something similar in the garden surely doesn’t hurt at all.
Thank you for making more flowers,
-e.