Deborah Cooke: Author

Maybe you noticed that I haven’t been around this week.

I had some sad news on the weekend and it pushed me off track a bit. A former neighbour of ours passed away during the summer and we just found out when another neighbour invited us to a memorial service. I usually talked to Beryl at Christmas – her birthday was around that time of year too – so didn’t have any idea. It wasn’t an enormous surprise as she’d had health problems for as long as I’d known her and was in her 80’s, but still.

It’s sad.

We used to talk about gardens and plants, and we shared seeds and cuttings, as well as “volunteers” that showed up in the wrong places. She had such a green thumb that she could coax anything to grow – much as my grandmother did – and I loved how she could make the most of her day. No matter how lousy she was feeling, she was happy to sit on the step with a cup of tea and say “just look at that flower over there. Isn’t it the prettiest thing you ever saw?”

Beryl had a lot of stories to share – some funny, some whimsical – and her garden was always filled to bursting with pink peony poppies. They were self-seeding annuals that had run amok because she didn’t have the heart to thin them. I’ve never been able to get them to grow as hers did, and she said I was too good to them. I’ll never forget the one summer that they really did well, and in between their fuschia pompoms were bright yellow coreopsis flowers. In the sunshine, that garden could melt your eyeballs. It was glorious.

So, I’m thinking that this year, I’ll give the poppy seeds pride of place, and toss some coreopsis into the middle of them.  Maybe gardeners live on, not just in memories, but in the gardens where their seeds have landed.