Memories are made of these
Now might be just the right time to introduce a new botanical tradition to your own family story, writes Julia Atkinson-dunn.
Even though I didn’t stay up to watch the Queen’s funeral, it wasn’t long before I caught the chatter about the beautiful flowers that adorned her coffin.
To gardeners, her funeral wreath was obviously more than simply decorative, as it featured many humble and familiar garden plants that perhaps wouldn’t normally be used in occasions of such pageantry.
There were winding limbs of rosemary, a symbol of remembrance, and English oak in the representation of strength.
Cut from the gardens of Buckingham Palace, Clarence House and Highgrove were roses, sedum, dahlias, scabious, pelargoniums and hydrangeas.
Perhaps most sentimental was the addition of myrtle, grown from a sprig of the same plant used in Queen Elizabeth’s wedding bouquet when she married Prince Philip in 1947.
The inclusion of the myrtle pinged my heartstrings and got me thinking about how plants can anchor themselves in our memories and stories as much as places and material items can.
In my own family, my sister and I carried on the tradition of including snips of homegrown blue tweedia (Oxypetalum coeruleum) in our wedding bouquets.
This began with our great-grandmother, before trickling through the generations to us. It made me feel linked to my lineage, in particular to my grandmother, who died when my mother was only in her early-20s.
I’m sure Mum felt this connection to her, too, while tucking tiny tweedia into her bouquet just a few years later.
Recently, a small group of us accompanied my gardening mentor, Penny Zino, to her childhood property Wynyard in North Canterbury, with the specific aim to view the mature stand of native planting curated by her late mother, Brownie Davison. Now under the care of her brother and sister-in-law Tim and Lou Davison, we stalked its edges and explored the undergrowth, finding a thread of Brownie within it.
In its midst was a fantastical stand of the native Clematis paniculata. Sprawling up and around surrounding trees, its starry white flowers glowed in the afternoon sun. This plant was an absolute favourite of Penny’s mother and the subject of many of her paintings.
Her passion for this clematis continued to capture the hearts of her family, with Lou weaving it through her hair on her own wedding day and Penny growing it in her own garden in her mother’s memory.
Another close gardening friend of mine,
Jenny Cooper, shared how she recently divided up some plants to send to her daughter on the Kāpiti Coast. This included a blue hosta that had belonged to her mother.
‘‘My mum passed away 10 years ago, and I know my daughter will cherish that this plant is from me, even when I am gone,’’ shared Cooper.
She is right in suggesting that this humble hosta has become a meaningful, living heirloom.
Cooper also raised the idea that plants hold memories. The saxifrage she grows was given to her by an elderly woman she helped after the Christchurch earthquakes. To Cooper, that plant is inextricably linked to her and that life-changing event.
Plants can bear witness to our lives and stopping to pay attention to them feels quite comforting to me.
I felt true delight when moving into my first home five years ago to discover a Japanese maple tucked away down the end of the garden. It was almost an exact replica of the one that grew outside the kitchen door at my childhood home near Hanmer Springs.
Even now I look at its lovely multi-stemmed form and remember the hot summers of twisting ourselves through its limbs. I feel compelled to introduce grape hyacinths in the ground nearby in direct reflection of the planting my mother did more than 40 years ago.
While it might be the most sentimental among us (my hand is shooting up) that attaches such human emotion to plants, they certainly are bridges to our past that are perhaps easier to cope with than an enormous inherited sideboard.
Now might be just the right time to introduce a new botanical tradition to your own family story.
Plants are bridges to our past that are perhaps easier to cope with than an enormous inherited sideboard.