My Mom's Azalea

Yesterday, I returned from spending a wonderful four-day visit with my daughter at the University of Miami.  It was a blessing for both of us.  After months away from home with no physical contact between us, she needed her mom.  And I needed to be needed.  We did a lot of nothing special except spending time together, which is really the most special thing of all, and the visit filled us both up and helped get her ready for the final push to the end of this spring semester, the final one of her first year away.

It brought me back a long way, to the spring of my sophomore year, my first at Cornell University, where I landed as a transfer student in the middle of a long, cold, snowy winter … the very first I was to spend on my own away from home.  Ithaca was always beautiful, but it could be brutal, and the thaw came late that year.  Back on Long Island, the gardens were in bloom, especially the one in the front of my house that my mom had planned and planted herself with a beautiful assortment of evergreens and dwarf shrubs.

Perhaps the most striking plant in the garden was a tremendous lilac azalea, its large soft purple flowers opening like trumpets to announce the annual changing of the seasonal guard from winter to spring.

That spring, a Polaroid of the azalea came enclosed in a letter to me at school (which knowing my mother, almost surely contained an original poem, as well).  It soothed my soul in the same way I hope my visit touched Jordan’s … it was a needed glimpse of home toward the end of a long journey.  The regal plant reminded me of where my own roots were, in that garden back home on Long Island.

Many years later, the bush got so large it needed thinning.  Mom dug up a part and asked if I’d like to add it to my own home garden.  Yes, I would.  And I did.  I will always remember the happiness and comfort it brought me seeing that plant, even in a photograph, and I would love to have it grace my own landscape.

I transplanted it two summers ago, just about six months before my mother passed away.  It’s taken firm root here now, growing, blossoming and linking me even more firmly to my past through its presence.

Which made it all the more fitting that it is what greeted me when I pulled into my driveway after returning from my visit with Jordan … my own Azalea x ‘Robles’ 'Autumn Lilac'.  In glorious bloom.  The plant and its beauty live on, continuing to tie our family together and link one generation to the next.

Roots.  They’re extraordinary things.