KNOWING HOW TO WRITE ABOUT FAMILY is an acquired skill. I would venture to guess that no one does it right the first time and that to do so takes more practice than any other topic. What do I mean by doing it “right,” you might ask? I mean with the lightness of touch on the part of the writer so the reader is not so busy picking up unneeded details that he or she misses the themes that hold up the piece. Have I got good example of that? I do. Here is an excerpt from A Way to Garden: A Hands-On Primer for Every Season, written by my big sister, Margaret Roach. Read on for how to win a copy of her new, bestselling book. Written when we were somewhat younger, I’d offer here that the essay below has lost nothing of its power. See if you agree. 

The Season of Sisterhood

by Margaret Roach

WE HAVE FOUND neutral ground, my sister and I. After three and a half decades, there is at last a place for us to be at peace, a new mother tongue that does not have so many angry phrases. We talk not of what has been, or might have been had someone or the other done something differently. We speak the language of flowers instead.

“I have an urgent garden question” is how her phone calls begin these days, and with those words we start rewriting the story of big sister-little sister, a tale that did not go so well the first time around.

No matter that she doesn’t always listen—she stored the dormant pot of calla lilies under the kitchen radiator, not exactly where I recommended, but they bloomed just swell the next year, anyhow. Her “urgent” questions are the opening lines of our revised first chapter of growing up together, and for that reason, I am grateful, and not so picky about such details.

When we were little, and the grandma she is named for grew them, my little sister crinkled her freckled nose and objected loudly to the stink of marigolds. Their gaudy color shone—positively gleamed—as if Grandma had planted them exactly to match the child’s orange hair. Young Marion was more inclined to horseplay than horticulture, however, her knees skinned and trousers shredded not from bending to the task of weeding but some far more hellish undertaking decidedly lacking in adult supervision. No time to stop and smell the flowers when you are playing cowboys.

Though not her namesake—perhaps they should have called me Lily, as hard as I tried to be demure—I never declined a chance to sit by Grandma Marion while she dried flowers from her garden in an old wooden press. From the lifeless bits she composed intricate arrangements that she later framed.

“Pressed-flower pictures,” we called them, proudly, but I remember that it was my room, not Marion’s, whose walls were covered in them. When she was not growing or pressing flowers, Grandma was painting pictures of them: a giant green ceramic vase of lilacs, a bowl of pansies, perhaps — and yes, of course, her precious marigolds.

Later, when Grandma was gone and growing pains were being felt full force at my end of the hallway, Marion was the sister who got bouquets from those who wished for her attention. Even then, Marion loved a rose—preferably long-stemmed and by the dozen—but I never actually thought that she would grow one. Apparently, I had something to learn about my sister, and about humility.

“Are those roses you gave me ramblers?” she asked not long ago, because they had clambered up and over this and that as rambler roses do. “You know, the ones you said were dead?”

The plants in question had arrived in time for an unseasonably early bout of high heat. Because I was not home, they had sat in their package in the sun, right where the UPS man left them. They stayed that way for days. Attempting a rescue on my return, I soaked them awhile in a bucket of water, and cut the cooked parts back, but they were too far gone to my impatient eye to bother with.

“I’ll take them,” said Marion, seeing the “dead” creatures lying on the lawn one day when she visited, and so she did. Within what seemed like no time, the dead plants had undergone a resurrection, and then proceeded quickly to ascend, too. By summer’s end, they were well up a trellis, where an enthusiastic tangle of vines—probably previous years’ casualties from my own garden—already grew lustily, as if to get back at me for my rejection.

There is a certain hazard to passing on your outcasts, whether to family or to friend. You may very likely have to face the plants again; do not forget this fact. Some, sent away because they were so aggressive, will quickly overtake their new home as they did your place. This does little to enhance the sense that the spirit of generosity was behind your gift.

Other plants were banished because their color proved too jarring; no spot for them could be found, no matter how hard you tried, so out they went, too. Such was the case with a dozen peach- and melon-colored daylilies, and I was glad to see them go.

I was not quite so glad to see them as a focal point at Marion’s, where somehow, magically, they fit right in as if custom-ordered for the spot.

It is not all having to grit teeth, of course, not all a test of one’s semi-good humor. I admit to an intense pleasure when she comes to pick my apples in fall, knowing I will hear about the pies and sauce for months to come. The image of them on her table is a good one, as if the act of sharing a harvest is deeply knit into the gardener’s soul. The summer I planted three-dozen tomato seedlings, her own crop was lost to some animal invasion. No matter, between us there was plenty. Fruits heal all wounds, even those as old as childhood.

For now, the phone keeps ringing with the questions, although I suspect she doesn’t really need the answers any more, and could even give a few herself. Admittedly, I will not try storing my callas inside the radiator cover, but there is a certain red poppy in her garden I’d like the name of, or better yet, some of its seeds.

We are actually beginning to look more alike as a consequence of this shared passion. They say that family traits are often revealed as the years go by, but that’s not it. In our case it is the matching scratches on the insides of our forearms I refer to, the marks of rose thorns, or the ankle-encircling scars from wasp nests run over with the mower. It is the red half-circles behind each neck where the sun found its way in to sear our skin. Even our gardens have taken on a certain similarity: she, too, plants pumpkins in her flower beds, as if this idiosyncrasy were a familial trait.

There is more to this gardening stuff than planting, I guess, more than the books offer in step-by-step detail. No wonder, then, that the language of gardening and the language of life have so many words in common: words like tend and cultivate, words like grow.

Author bio: Margaret Roach is the author of A Way to Garden: A Hands-On Primer for Every Season and several other books. You can find her at her website, where you can also listen to her weekly podcast. She and her book are the lead-off and wow-oh-wow review in The New York Times summer book list. That’s right: Number one. 

HOW TO WIN A COPY OF THE BOOK

Did you love the author featured above? Did you learn something about how to write about family? Then you’ve got to read the book. And you can. I am giving away one copy, and all you have to do to win is leave a comment below about something you learned from the excerpt. I’ll draw winners at random (using the tool at random dot org) after entries close at midnight Monday, July 1, 2019. Unfortunately, only readers within the US domestic postal service can receive books.

Good luck!

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