A mother’s legacy blooms in ABQ
Oh, how she used to roll her eyes when her mother urged her to stop and smell the roses and the other flowers in the family garden.
“So many flowers,” Yvonne Beckley chuckles. “In the front yard, back yard, side yard. She even had flowers in the front patch of ground on the other side of the sidewalk. Verbena and iris in the back, roses and peonies on the side. They were everywhere. I used to get tired of her getting me to walk around to see and sniff all of them.”
Her mother, Angelina Garcia, had a knack for making things bloom. Children. Friendships. Flowers. Especially flowers. “People would come just to look at her flowers, especially those peonies,” Beckley recalls. “She was a master gardener way before the term existed. She just learned by doing.”
Beckley tells me about those peonies, how in her mother’s loving hands they were transformed from tuberous roots gnarled like an old woman’s fingers into aromatic clouds of pink and white and crimson, some as big as softballs, so many years ago.
These were flowers of historical significance, Beckley explains, rescued from the gardens of the Alvarado Hotel, a magnificent Spanish Mission-style landmark built as a gracious respite for train travelers in 1902, then lost recklessly to urban renewal in 1970.
Beckley sent me a short essay she had written, a Mother’s Day tribute to her mom and the peonies that survived long after the Alvarado gardens were reduced to gravel.
Her father, Archie Garcia, a city land agent, had rescued the peonies before the bulldozers came.
“Call it serendipitous or call it accidental, coincidental or call it just plain lucky, but whoever was digging up the beautiful peonies that grew in the gardens of the hotel asked my father if he’d like to take them home,” she wrote. “My memory tells me that my father helped dig them up and took them home to a very grateful and talented gardener.”
Home for the Garcias and their four children — Beckley was the youngest — was a tiny bungalow at 11th and the aptly named Rosemont NW, where nearly every day one could find Beckley’s mother in a broad-brimmed hat tending her flowers.
“She was always in the yard digging,” Beckley recalls. “Here’s a funny story. She grew these beautiful Oriental poppies, deep orange with black centers. So pretty. But then somewhere she read some poppies are grown to make opium and she became terrified that she was going to be arrested, so she tore them up.” She stuck to peonies. The years passed. The flowers bloomed, then browned, then faded away. In late autumn, her mother cut back the peonies to nearly nothing. In late spring, they burst forth from the soil as beautiful and bounteous as before.
“It’s like they bloomed for her,” she says.
Beckley and her siblings grew, too, leaving the home at 11th and Rosemont to raise families of their own. Beckley and her husband had four children and are now the proud grandparents of 11.
In 1993, her mother passed away, five years after her father’s death. Angelina Garcia was 89.
The house at 11th and Rosemont was sold, the garden plowed under by new owners and replaced with gravel, the same fate that had befallen the gardens at the Alvarado.
This time, though, it was Beckley and her siblings who rescued the peonies, harvesting the tuberous roots and planting them in their own yards.
“We left none of them behind,” she said. “They say it takes a couple of years for peonies to get going again once they are replanted, but these just took off right away.”
Beckley and her husband moved once more, this time to a Far Northeast Heights subdivision aptly named Primrose Pointe. The peonies went with her.
Today, some 20 bushes are bursting with big, fragrant puffs of petals in that same brilliant crimson hue she remembers as a child in her mother’s garden.
“I always keep my fingers crossed that the late frosts will not keep the flowers from blooming on Mother’s Day,” she says. This year, Beckley is in luck. “I’m hoping that when I’m gone, my children will dig them up for themselves and let the legend continue,” she wrote in her essay. “I certainly cannot claim to be the gardener that my mother was, but my peonies look very healthy and attractive as they honor one very special master gardener.”
Nobody needs to urge her anymore to stop and smell the roses, the peonies and the other flowers. She knows now how right her mother was about that.