By ELIZABETH BETTENDORF
Published October 17, 2003
Christina Bellamy grew up wondering about the nature of life in her parents' garden:
When the maple trees floated seeds to earth, she watched small trees grow leggy and made Popsicle stick fences so they might be spared from the rotary lawn mower.
When she visited her grandparents on an island on Lake Erie, she loved the smell of the compost pile. It hinted of the forest floor, she remembers, a "fertile smell of solace and comfort."
This was a long time ago.
Now 61, Bellamy, a psychotherapist who practices in north Tampa, lectures frequently on spirituality and gardening.
She will speak from 9 a.m. to noon Oct. 25 at St. Andrew's Episcopal Church in downtown Tampa.
Her love for gardening blossomed into a lifelong journey; first on 110 acres in northeastern Ohio; and eventually in Florida, her home since 1980.
Florida is a humbling place to be a gardener, she said. She gave up growing zucchini long ago. And everyone knows tomatoes don't taste as wondrous and juicy as those plucked in a summer garden in the north.
Our "horrendous rains and massive droughts" may frustrate, she said, but they let us know that "something bigger is going on."
As far as the seasons, it's easy to believe they don't exist.
But open your eyes, she urges, and you will see.
Intuit, maybe.
"Smell the air right now," Bellamy said. "Dry air smells different than humid air. Look at the migrating birds, the swamp maples are vibrant red, the Granny Smith green of our landscape has turned brown and the sycamores have dropped their leaves."
In her own garden in Clearwater, Bellamy grows three kinds of papaya (Trang Viet Cuisine on Fowler Avenue used to serve it in their salads), banana trees, six kinds of ginger, rosemary and all sorts of butterfly plants that even draw hummingbirds.
The crown jewel is a 40-foot grapefruit tree full of thorns and fat, seedy fruit. Each one, she says, squeezes 14 ounces of juice.
Her 2,000-square-foot garden is an extension of her home, a collection of all kinds of plants people have given her over the years. Not a showplace.
But a place.
Just like her home.
"Home to me means place," she said. "It's not about the kind of window treatments you have or flooring or Martha Stewart paint colors."
Home to Bellamy is where she and her husband raised their large blended family - seven kids, lots of pets. The couch is so scratched by the cat that one year at Christmas they slapped a piece of duct tape over the tears.
"Green duct tape," Bellamy said, "for the holidays."
The duct tape remains.
So does her sentiment toward her home and garden.
On Oct. 28, 2002, the Bellamys' 35-year-old daughter, Hilary, a senior policy associate who specialized in maternal and child health issues, collapsed while running a marathon in Washington, D.C.
She lapsed into a coma and died the next day.
"Needless to say, it's been a long, strange year," Bellamy said.
On the anniversary of Hilary's death, friends will gather at the Bellamys' house to remember a friend they loved.
"This is where she grew up, played, had her babies," Bellamy said. "Her close friends who grew up with her still know our home phone number."
By heart.
What Bellamy's husband, Ned, also knows by heart is the emotional road map of their home.
One day he wrapped his hand around the front door knob and paused.
"Think of all the times Hilary had her hand on this knob to go out this door," he said.
Christina Bellamy wears her silver hair short and has a way of describing things like her favorite nature writers and poets:
Mary Oliver, Annie Dillard, Wendell Berry.
She is generous with readings and thoughts, calling someone she has just met to say she has found some poems she thinks are particularly beautiful.
In parting, she gives away a collection of quotes she has gathered over the years.
At the top of the list, the words of Alla Renee Rozarth, from the 1991 book Earth Prayers:
"The small plot of ground on which you were born cannot be expected to stay forever the same. Earth changes, and home becomes different places," Rozarth wrote. "You have opposing terrain in each eye. You belong to land and sky of your first cry, you belong to infinity."
