Mama’s Garden

Mama’s Garden

When you produce much fruit, you are my true disciples. This brings great glory to my Father. John 15:8

Some of my greatest inspirations for learning how to grow flowers were the gardens my mother had throughout her fifty-nine years of life. I didn’t start out with a green thumb, but I’d seen Mom grow blue and purple morning glories and other flowers on the fences wherever we lived (the first one I remember was on Morningside Lane—no kidding!), and I figured I could do it too. The gardens of my childhood held red and yellow roses and gardenia bushes because Mama took time to plant and nurture them so we’d all enjoy the fragrant smell as we walked into the house. Old fashioned irises always rimmed the edge of the yard where we played.

Mama’s life bore much fruit in the five daughters and one son she mothered marvelously, even though she was widowed at age thirty-six. She lived a life of prayer, which will bear fruit for eternity, and her gardens bore fruit and flowers that blessed many. When she realized her dream and was able to buy a little ranch in East Texas, she grew vegetables, fig trees, and pear trees and was immensely proud of the crisp pears from which she made pies to give away to neighbors and family. Violets grew wild around the oak trees. Climbing rosebushes and zinnias thrived in the sandy soil of her East Texas garden.

Mama’s flowers gave me a small taste of the joys of heaven, where she is enjoying seeing Jesus face-to-face today. Though she’s been gone for more than twenty-five years, I, too, have planted morning glories, roses, and zinnias in my garden. In the backyard beneath a tree is one of the violets from Mama’s ranch, and it blooms like crazy every spring. Whenever I water or plant or see the blooms, I think of my mother and her legacy of beautifying every place she lived with a colorful riot of flowers, no matter how busy she was caring for six children and running a household. And I ask God to bring forth a fruitful legacy from my life as well. —CHERI

Thank you, God, for my mother and the wonderful harvest from her life’s work. Thank you that she passed on to me a love for flowers and living things. Help me to bear fruit in my life and in my garden that will bless others as my mother’s life and gardens blessed me.

There is a garden in every childhood, an enchanted place where colors are brighter, the air softer, and the morning more fragrant than ever again.

—ELIZABETH LAURENCE, ACTOR