It’s taken me until age seventy-two to learn the joy and fulfillment of having a garden.
My mom was an avid and respected gardener in Rochester. Friends and neighbors, even total strangers, would ask for cuttings from her garden. Out front, flowering plants framed the walkway from the sidewalk to our front door, bringing bright colors to a mulberry tree, two huge spruce trees, and complementing a magnolia that I gave her for her birthday when I was twelve. Our backyard was framed by beds of peonies, roses, and lilies of the valley. Other flowering plants were along the edges; blackberries in the back; fruit trees in the center around a huge tree—an oak, I believe, that my brothers and I climbed! Oh, and there was a conveniently located clump of chives right by the kitchen window.
Mom never made gardening seem like a chore; it was clearly what she loved to do. She only sold our family home when she reached the point of not being able to do her own beloved gardening any longer; although she found someone to help with the hard work of weeding and maintenance, it wasn’t the same as doing it herself.
Ever since leaving home for college, I lived in apartments or the occasional room in a house. Either my buildings didn’t have gardens or any landscaping was done by the management. I usually had houseplants, and they did do well; Mom’s green thumb apparently came to me, and I enjoyed choosing, installing and caring for both foliage and flowering plants. It never really felt like real gardening, though, maybe because it was limited to indoor, potted plants.
Over the years, my writing and editing work included quite a few garden or flower projects — writing about the National Arboretum in DC, a feature about a leading garden expert, even a memoir-like piece about my mother’s garden for the Upstate Gardener’s Journal, and copyediting and proofreading a DC-area garden magazine for several years now. When I think about it now, those projects fed a hibernating gardener who wasn’t doing any actual gardening. Yet.
When I became a first-time homeowner at sixty-five, buying a condo in a building that had a small garden space, I joined the landscape committee and participated in a couple of planting and weeding days, but I still didn’t see myself as a gardener. I had only a limited voice in what was used and how the plants were arranged. It was fun to participate, but it never felt like “me” or mine.
I made a change and now, for the first time in my life, I have a garden of my own, and I’m loving it! In fact, two: a small space next to the walkway from the entry gate to my front door, and a large patio out back, with a stunning view of the Sandia Mountains. They frame my new place—a one-story condo outside Albuquerque in a community of similar homes spread over several acres. It’s like having my own little cottage, rather than being in a stack of units.
The presence of those garden spaces was a major factor in deciding to buy this new place (which I hope is the last one I ever move to).
An immediate attraction was that my front garden has a chaste tree or vitex, which my sister-in-law said would have purple blossoms—and it does. We all got a kick out of that, since I’m known for my passion for all things purple. There also was a tall, large patch of some kind of grass around something taller.. On the advice of a friend who’s knowledgeable about local flora and with the recommendation of a neighbor, I found a landscaper who cleared out what was non-native grass and revealed a bird of paradise plant that has been thriving with my attention and is currently full of red and yellow blossoms.
The patio came with a huge yucca, a patch of rosemary and even a lilac bush—a nice link to my hometown of Rochester, lilac capital of the country. The lilac was neglected to the point of not blooming this season, so I don’t know what color its flowers will be, but the fact that it is thriving in the New Mexico climate was a lovely surprise. It’s going to have a couple of cousins when the time is right for putting in new plants, and they’ll be shades of purple. The yucca is responding to TLC with bright-white flowers on the tips of its branches. In the meantime, while I eagerly wait for planting season, my family here has given me a crepe myrtle and a purple salvia, along with a couple of purple tomato plants. I have plans to add iris and perhaps a couple other flowers that will remind me of and strengthen my connection to my mom.
The management company handles landscaping of public areas, and I recently asked for and received permission to add a few native plants to the bare gravel between the sidewalk and my front gate.
I’m not doing a lot of digging and planting yet. I’m finding myself as a gardener and feeling more complete and fulfilled than I ever remember. This sensation is a wonderful bonus from a new life in a new place. A long-buried part of me, one I think of as connected to my mom, has bloomed and become a primary part of my days and view of myself. I’m a gardener!
Who knows what will evolve.
Ruth E. Thaler-Carter is a longtime freelance writer/editor/proofreader whose motto is “I can write about anything.” She has been copyediting and proofreading for Washington Gardener magazine for several years; has written for the Upstate Gardener’s Journal and Floral Management, the Society of American Florists’s magazine, among other outlets and is a member of GardenComm. As this article shows, she is finding herself as a gardener and channeling her mother in the process.
This article originally appeared in the November/December 2025 issue of Upstate Gardeners’ Journal.
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