I had a bee in my bonnet the other day. Literally. I was checking the hive at my parents – it’s a bit of a ritual that I enjoy with my dad. We load up the smoker and tools in his golf cart, I don my beekeeper suit and out we go to the back forty to check on the bees.
I zipped up hastily and got to work opening the hive as a cloud of bees enveloped me; not angrily but just being in guard mode. When I heard a bee’s high-pitched buzzing, I knew immediately the bee was inside the veiled hat. Somehow it had embedded itself into my ponytail. Experience has taught me not to panic but to simply walk away and reorganize. Once released and my bee suit properly arranged, I got back to work. There actually wasn’t a lot to do, everything was fine. He’d been concerned that they needed another super added because of their increased activity.
My dad used to keep bees, and when I was a teenager, I guess I had better things to do. Now, finally after all these years we’ve joined forces, although he prefers to just chauffeur me and not get too close to them. There are numerous stories of his close encounters with bees, including capturing swarms with my uncle. While there are some things he never did with his hives, such as using a queen excluder (to keep the queen and the brood away from the upper tier of “honey supers”) or having to deal with pest management as the Varroa mites emerged in the late 80s after he’d stopped beekeeping. We aren’t always on the same page about best practices, and mostly I defer to him, but sometimes I update him.
We have a kinship in the garden realm that follows suit. Questions I have had over the years, he always has the answer to. It’s a fun exchange and one that I wouldn’t alter. We are alike in many ways and have habits both irksome and endearing, to be sure, but the one we share with singular passion is gardening.
It is no surprise that I should feel such a strong affinity for the land over the years. Those roots run deep. He learned about horticulture from a natural: my great-grandmother, whose lush floral borders and handsome plots of vegetables were more than enough to cut one’s horticultural teeth on. She ran a variety store, where vegetables and fruit were often requested by regulars who came for meats and dry goods. Here, Dad kept chickens and, by the age of 10, while playing with the tractor and horse and doing farm chores at his paternal grandparents’ farm nearby. Haying, harvesting and digging potatoes were among those tasks, as well as weeding and cultivating.
One of the earliest photos of my father shows him in a stroller, reaching out to touch a bridal wreath spirea in full bloom. It would foretell a lifelong love of nurturing nature. I would inherit that as naturally as his height, blue eyes and blonde hair.
My earliest garden moment was watching Dad build a patio at my great grandmother’s in Uxbridge along the Blackstone River Valley, where the overlapping scenery resembled a lavish storybook illustration. There was an air of romance about the place, and it is clearly etched in my brain, probably the result of sensory stimulation that it imparted so long ago.
Summers were spent luxuriating in that space, whether together as a family relaxing beneath the mammoth willow, or as a solitary wanderer, where I wasn’t much bigger than the plants. Depending on the season, I went blueberry picking and had a favorite hideaway on a hill where lily of the valley grew in profusion. One unpleasant incident occurred when I ate red berries off a viburnum bush and had an immediate reaction that required a doctor. The scale and variety here seemed endless to a child, and it was this same God-blessed land that surely directed my father’s interests as a boy.
My parents’ first home was a modified version of this Eden, fit to a suburban lot that my dad transformed in the initial years. It was, hand down, the most beautiful property in the neighborhood. I frankly don’t know how he managed it with all the rest he did. While working as a project manager in the construction industry, he finished the interior of the house, added a breezeway, built stone walls, a basketball court, patio and a complementary landscape that included a dazzling assortment of plants with an aesthetic that suited family living.
He coached Little League, took part in local organizations and hunted with our English setter, who later bore two litters of puppies. Our yard was highly interactive – football and baseball were played on the lawn, and in winter the basketball court was converted into a skating rink. Still, there was a place for everything, and it was always tidy. Some credit must go to Mom as well.
Years later, when I was a teen, we moved into a house Dad designed and built; one with significantly more acreage, contiguous to fields, streams and forests. A few of the acres of wilderness were tamed, and gardens flourished as they do today.
It wasn’t until I began installing gardens of my own that I reflected on my father’s achievements. It became clear that he had given me a huge gift by setting the example of hard work, dedication and love. When I moved to Mattapoisett, I knew the garden would be an important part of our home, as life filters outdoors especially in the warm seasons. I set to work and over the years have earned praise from my father. The raised beds I plant each year for vegetable production don’t come close to his, and although he’s promised to downsize each year, “it’s still just as big,” says my mom.
As the years continued, my father challenged himself with growing different plants, clearing more of his back woods to plant. With two acres in cultivation, he mostly grew rhododendrons, box, hollies, spirea, and enough Christmas trees to keep the extended family happy.
I remember when, back in the 1970s, he was obsessed with fruit trees and recall his videography of the small orchard consisting of dozens of closeups of the fruit blossoms, back when he bought their first video camera. At the time my siblings and I thought it was bland, as exciting as watching grass grow. It makes me laugh now because I have made a habit of shooting too many pictures of my gardens year after year. It’s a kind of hereditary reflex, I think.
Although I look forward to my own harvest from my vegetable garden, I can always expect that my father will give me some of his, and thus it was after we checked the hive that he gave me several eggplant – “Your mom is finished with them” he said, suggesting that she has her fill of preparing meals with them, no doubt having put them in the freezer. He also gave me several tomatoes, including a new brand “Celebrity” as well as a bunch of green peppers (mine were small in comparison) and a handful of garlic cloves.
We talk of the latest visitors to their property – a bobcat and a red-tailed hawk – and he shows me the deer damage to evergreen trees and the evidence of turkeys dusting themselves in a cleared section of the field. These reports give me a sense of connectedness both to these sacred spaces of my youth and to know that there can be continuity over time.
Fast-forward to now and some of these practices are carried on; vegetables and fruits are stored along shelves in their cellar/garage, and onions are strung up in the barn. Likewise, a structure remains – gardens that have reached their maturity and my father and sometimes my mom putting things in order with help from my brother, who has a side gig in landscaping. Not just the structure of place but of a life. Gardening and writing about it is an avocation for me, and I can’t think of it ever winding down.
As I sat enjoying a piece of peach and blueberry pie that my mother made, my father caught me by surprise, saying that he might have devoted himself to something other than growing shrubs and trees. I immediately countered with what is true. “Without it, where would we be?” His nurturing propelled me (and my brother) toward the most wonderful preoccupation on the planet: gardening. We both know that what he loves most about gardening is the satisfaction it gives and the results.
Someday soon, I will ask my father for his photo album containing his fruit-tree pictures. I’d like to compare them to ours and to just appreciate that the apple doesn’t fall far. More and more I realize how much his way of doing things has become my way.
“A man’s children and his garden both reflect the amount of weeding done during the growing season.”
The Seaside Gardener
By Laura McLean
