My mother’s name was Rose Marie—most appropriate for when she attended church, sitting at the end of the third row, her mouth pursed into a straight line and her eyes staring obediently at the altar. Yet, one of her male friends called her “Rosie,” which, most of the time, suited her better. She was feisty, knew how to get you to do what she wanted, and a woman with the most interesting hobbies. One of her favorite hobbies was her appreciation of flowers.
It’s not surprising, then, that I’ve loved flowers since I was a little girl. When I was four years old, playing house with my younger brother, my mother grew calla lilies in a corner of the back yard. I admired heir smooth, white bell-shaped flowers and bright, yellow pistils, and my mother called them “resurrection” flowers because they bloomed around Easter time when Jesus rises from the dead.
My mother cut the lilies and took them indoors to decorate our dining room table. I loved their intoxicating scent–a comforting aroma of clover mixed with a lemony fragrance. Their creamy-textured petals exuded luxury, and they lasted longer than most other cut flowers.
When we lived in Air Force base housing for four years in England, my mother planted bulbs in the rectangular planting beds under the windows in the front yard. After the snow melted in late January, daffodils poked their green shoots out of the brown soil. Day by day, I watched them grow bigger and taller. The flower knobs soon formed, and, slowly, pastel yellow flowers peeked out from the green stalks until one day they brightened our simple front yard with happy yellow fringed trumpets.
After the daffodils lost their blaze, the tulips came up behind them like copycats—rising like slender dolls out of the earth until, in a few weeks, their red cups of petals swayed in the light breezes of March. My mother told me to never pick a tulip because they represented perfect love, and she wanted them to bloom for as long as possible to bring good luck to our home. The variety of tulips that she grew were just right—not too showy, not too dramatic, not overly romantic. When they were blooming, our front yard felt comfortable and stable.
Across the street from this house on Shepherd’s Way was a forest where bluebells bloomed in mass profusion every April and May. English bluebells are associated with fairies, those miniature creatures that cause mischief for humans. I had a wistful imagination, and I spent hours walking amongst these bluebells with their sticky stems, watching for fairies and feeling grateful for the experience of being lost in a sea of blossoms.
My mother let me take a bucket out to the forest and fill it full of bluebells. I brought them home and arranged them in as many vases I could find, and when the vases were full, I used Mason jars for the rest of the flowers. I placed vases and jars full of the humble bluebells on bookcases, tables, dressers, and night stands, and my mother’s blue eyes lit up when she saw them.
My high school years were dominated by carnations. Homecomings, proms, dances, and balls called for corsages, and corsages always came as carnations. After the dances, I saved each corsage by sticking its stem into a tiny vase of water. Later, I dried it out on a saucer on my dresser, and, often, lifted it to my nose to inhale its floral and peppery scent. My mother didn’t like them because their scent reminded her of funerals and sadness.
When I was seventeen, my mother and I visited The Berkeley Rose Garden, a colorful display built into the hills of Berkeley comprised of hundreds of varieties of roses and thousands of individual rose bushes. The rose beds were terraced on the hills into the shape of an amphitheater and separated by flagstone paths.
My mother taught me the differences between polyantha roses, floribunda roses, and tea roses, and she explained how new roses were developed by cross-breeding every year. I liked the polyantha buses for their smaller heights and tightly packed blooms. I liked the floribunda bushes for their profusion of blossoms on branching stems, especially the varieties that produced variegated blooms like “purple tiger”—roses with streaks of purple, lavender, and white in each flower. These showy bushes had other dramatic names, too, like Celestial Night, Scentimental, Sweet Madame Blue, and Forever Amber.
Most of all, I adored the tea roses—their thick stems punctuated by large thorns and leaves that grew in patterns of five, with the stems ending in large graceful blooms of circling petals. The names for these sophisticated blooms were grandiose—Double Delight, Mister Lincoln, Chantilly Cream, Love Song, and Oympiad.
Arbors held the climbing roses like the orange Top of the World, the pink Pearly Gates, and the lavender Long Song varieties. Shrub roses and tree roses filled in every nook and cranny so that the whole garden produced a cacophony of colors for our eyes.
Together, we read the names of as many varieties as we could, pausing at the ones that were the most fragrant or dazzling. I nestled my nose into the blooms as deep as I dared, trying to memorize the smells forever. Never before had I been in the midst of such splendor, unrivaled beauty, and mesmerizing fragrances.
According to Mother, each color of rose had its own meaning and the number of roses given has a significance as well. Yellow roses are for friendship and red roses show love. Six roses means a growing affection and a dozen roses demonstrates complete love.
The Berkeley Rose Garden also possessed an incomparable backdrop for our mother-daughter conversation. As we walked together between the rows, we wondered at the vast view of the San Francisco Bay where the Golden Gate Bridge spread across the Bay’s exit like the arms of a graceful goddess. The water changed from denim to indigo to periwinkle to cerulean to navy to slate depending on how the surrounding hills cast their shadows, the currents massaged its surface, and the sun penetrated into the prisms of the ocean’s molecules.
Back at home, around the perimeter of my mother’s Sacramento patio grew dozens of camellia bushes under the shade of a giant mulberry tree. From November to April, these glossy green overgrown bushes produced hundreds of curly, pink blossoms. Mother told her children that camellias mean “young sons and daughters,” which seemed so fitting for my mother’s house since she had ten children who were easily outnumbered by the profusions of camellias in her garden.
When my mother moved into an assisted living apartment, she made sure that she had a vase in her cupboard for flowers. This vase was about 8 inches high and made out of white milk glass; any type of flower would look beautiful in it.
She had developed macular degeneration in both eyes, so she couldn’t read or, sometimes, even find the food on her dinner plate; she could, however, always sense when you held a bouquet of flowers in your hands to give her. A smile that matched the petals of a pink rose would light up her face as she took them from you.
She asked you to put them in her vase or find a place for them on her desk or window sill. Every few days, she called and told you how they looked or smelled, or how many blooms were still perky or drooping, until one day, she called and told you that she was cleaning out the vase. I gave her lilies at Easter, red roses during the summer, chrysanthemums during the fall, and a poinsettia at Christmastime. Her favorite were always the roses because, after all, she was named after them.
I ordered the flowers for my mother’s casket when she died. The funeral representative recommended a spray of red roses and red carnations, but I knew better. Never would I allow carnations to come near my dear mom. I ordered the largest spray of red roses I could because I knew that nothing less would make her happier.
The officiate at the gravesite told us that red roses were such an appropriate choice. “Red roses symbolize eternal love,” he said. We placed our spray of eternal love over her gravesite after the service, and their blooms thrived for weeks in the chilly California air of December and January.
Two months later, my husband bought me a dozen deep red roses for Valentine’s Day. I carefully extracted them, one by one, from the brown wrapping paper, snipped each stem with a pair of sharp pruning scissors by about one inch, and arranged them in a tall, clear crystal vase filled with fresh water and rose food. Then, I ceremoniously placed the vase of love on the coffee table in the living room—a place visible from most places in our house during the day.
One day, as he sat in an arm chair in front of these red roses, he told me how wonderful he felt looking at their beauty. “I’ve never thought about how beautiful flowers looked before,” he said, with joy filling his eyes. “I want to sit here forever.”
I realized then, that my mother’s appreciation of flowers was so strong that its influence had passed from her to me, and through me, to my husband. My love for flowers also positively influences my son, my daughter, my friends, and even people I don’t know with the optimistic power of beauty.
My mother—my Rosie knew that the delicate blooms of flowers—so ethereal in their form and beauty—are most extraordinary at communicating the powerful, yet intangible nature of love.
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