Print

Email story

Comment

Email editor

Homes

Behind the gardens, the stories

By ELIZABETH BETTENDORF
Published April 21, 2006

As I was driving over the Courtney Campbell Parkway the other day, drinking in the wash of sky and water and feeling gratitude for my life in Florida, something at the end of the bridge caught my eye. It was a couple of students from Clearwater Christian College waving a banner advertising a school performance of the play The Secret Garden.

The Edwardian children's novel by British-American author Frances Hodgson Burnett, about a neglected garden nourished by the healing power of love, remains one of my favorite stories. One of the most endearing subplots depicts the joy and sense of purpose that restoring a once locked and dreary courtyard garden brings the three young protagonists.

In a season of garden tours and fetes, I have gotten to thinking a lot about gardens, gardeners and the beauty of a well-loved plot of land.

Every year come March and April, the gardens in the Tampa Bay area are at their finest. I have toured beautiful gardens everywhere here, marveling how a sense of color and design - not to mention a green thumb - transcends income and neighborhood.

I have noted the eclectic nature of green spaces, including one that featured an aviary built by its animal trainer owner. There was a quiet shade garden, carefully thought out and tucked behind a turn-of-the-20th-century foursquare, a magnificent rose garden cultivated by a ballerina in one of Tampa's most industrial neighborhoods, where she was able to buy a swath of land affordable on a teaching salary.

In my journeys covering homes north of Tampa, I have visited some of the most beautiful gardens anywhere, often grown cheaply, creatively and through the nurturing passion and knowledge of their owners. In several of those gardens, the families built ponds - twice, it was a mother-son effort - after taking classes on the subject and putting their newfound knowledge to work.

Several other gardens were designed to attract butterflies and hummingbirds, another was nestled behind a tiny concrete block house, a tribute to native Florida plants and the gardener mother of the woman who had cultivated it.

My own father is an amazing gardener, a master gardener, a master naturalist and an expert on orchids and crotons in particular. In our 1-acre back yard at our home in the Midwest, we always had breathtaking gardens that included perennial flowers, roses, dahlias and, for a time, a vegetable garden that produced some of the best homegrown tomatoes I have ever tasted.

The joy of walking barefoot through the soft grass on a summer afternoon, plucking a tomato fresh from the vine and eating it over the kitchen sink, with a sprinkle of salt over the wedges, remains a pleasure that I cannot replicate in Florida.

Our neighbors gardened fervently too. Their dahlias won serious accolades for decades, as did their cooking with the vegetables they grew. (I still think longingly of their loaves of warm zucchini bread delivered straight from the oven.)

So, even though I am not a gardener myself (I now live in a place with no yard - just a deck that bakes under full sun most of the day and a front courtyard that languishes in full shade), I thoroughly laud the efforts of the gardeners I write about.

On my daily walks, I always make a point to stop and talk to gardeners who happen to be outside. Over the years, I've made many friends that way, reeled in article ideas, and learned life stories.

Just the other day I paused to talk to a woman digging in her garden in Safety Harbor and learned that her parents had lived in the house before her.

Each day I take in the colors of the flowers blooming, the scents that fill the air at night, the early spring orange blossoms, the jasmine later in the season, and the herbs that kitchen gardeners cultivate.

Florida's gardens are never as lovely as they are in springtime. That's only a matter of opinion, of course, perhaps because I cherish our dewy spring the way Northerners hold dear the fall: with a wisdom of the harsh weather that awaits before another cycle of beauty can begin.

[Last modified April 20, 2006, 13:11:23]