The Memory Garden: An Introduction

A serialized memoir about creating a dedicated garden infused with meaning and memories—and a guide to creating one yourself

Jul 01, 2024

The picture above is of my mother, Beverly Splan, at the age of 14 or 15. It is my favorite picture of her, partly because it is one of the few photos I have of her where she looks genuinely happy. It shows her in the garden of the convent of the Sisters of Notre Dame, who taught at her school. She adored the nuns and she loved to garden and I imagine those hours spent planting a flower bed for them were truly joyful for her.

There are many things I could say about my mother; she was not a simple person. She had a curious and creative mind but was not much of a risk-taker. She had a nurturing nature and managed to raise three children mostly on her own when single parenthood was a role she was never prepared for. She was the OG Mama Grizzly. She endured losses starting early in her childhood that left her with serious insecurities, but if I could have wished anything for her, it would have been a greater sense of resilience rather than just a determination to survive. She loved to bake and do crafts. She played piano. She sang in the church choir. And she became a reserve deputy in the county sheriff’s department. Like I said—not a simple person.

My mom was in her early 70s when we began to notice problems. At first, it was just forgetting things—names, dates, keys. (So many keys!) Within a couple years it progressed to more obvious cognitive issues. By the time I dragged her, very much against her wishes, to a doctor, I already knew what the problem most likely was. Her oldest sister had already died following a years-long struggle with Alzheimer’s; I could not even have imagined that in the years that followed her other two sisters would also go on to develop dementia and would die even before my mother. None of them lasted anywhere close to the more than 15 years that my mom eventually spent with Alzheimer’s chipping away at her, swallowing her memories, her words, her humor, her character, until finally there was nothing left but a shell of a person with a determined heartbeat.

I am at an age where the death of a parent is common among my peers; many of my friends lost their parents at a much earlier age. It is an expected thing that you will outlive your parents, but of course, that doesn’t make it easy, and grief is a road everyone has to walk eventually. For me, and I think for most people who have lost someone to Alzheimer’s or a similar degenerative disease, grief begins long before the loved one dies. The darkest days were not the days surrounding her death. They were the days I realized I could no longer have a conversation with my mom because she couldn’t follow what I was saying; that she would never call me on the phone again; that she couldn’t remember my name or that I was her daughter. That all happened years before the date on her death certificate. So in my mind, there is the date she stopped breathing and the murky days, months, years that came earlier, when she slipped away, little by little, and the grieving really began, unacknowledged and untreated but so very real.

Changing the Landscape

Thinking back, it’s interesting to me that it was around the time that my mother’s dementia was barely beginning to show that I started gardening. I bought my first house, which had a small garden—one of my absolute requirements in my house hunt. My mother was thrilled I got the house and loved to come and help me in the garden. We talked about what to plant. She passed on to me her much-used, beaten-up copy of The Sunset Western Garden Book. I remember warm afternoons when we took breaks from weeding to drink tall glasses of ice water on the deck and discuss what project should be tackled next. The garden is where I still feel her presence most.

One of the things that often trips people up when they are navigating the loss of a loved one is that their loss changes their whole world, but for everyone else, everything is the same. The planet keeps spinning, as it should, yet no one else can recognize how altered it all is. It is a common feeling and also an isolating one. David Kessler, who collaborated with Elisabeth Kübler-Ross on her landmark research into death and grief, wrote about how one community found a way of dealing with this in his book Finding Meaning: The Sixth Stage of Grief:

“I was touring in Australia when I met a researcher who told me about the work she was doing to study the way of life in the northern indigenous villages of Australia. One of the villagers told her that the night someone dies, everyone in the village moves a piece of furniture or something else into their yard. The next day, when the bereaved family wakes up and looks outside, they see that everything has changed since their loved one died—not just for them but for everyone. That’s how these communities witness, and mirror, grief. They are showing in a tangible way that someone’s death matters. The loss is made visible.”

The key, it seems to me, is to change the landscape. To change it with intention and love and care. But I’m not talking about simply designing a pretty garden and installing a dedication plaque. I’m thinking of a garden where things have meaning and carry memories, a garden that is a living testament to the person no longer there.

Why I’m Writing “The Memory Garden”

I’ve been interested in the subject of memorial gardens for several years and have proposed writing a book on the topic to several publishers, but they always felt it would be too much of a downer. They didn’t understand that the point of creating a garden based on memories and steeped in meaning was to move past sadness and grief into the light. But in spite of the rejections, I couldn’t let go of the idea and since my mother died in 2022 I’ve wanted to put the idea into action. I’ve spent the past two years mulling over plans and plants that would accomplish what I intended, which required wading through some tangled emotional as well as horticultural territory, and I’m finally ready to dig in (pun intended) and make it happen.

The spot for the garden is a long, narrow, west-facing bed backed by a stucco-and-lattice fence. The fence needs repair and I want to have the bed raised for more planting depth. That will be the first hurdle.

I have my plant list ready; a number of the plants have been purchased and potted on and are waiting (impatiently, or so I imagine) to at last get in the ground. I’ve selected them for a variety of reasons that I’ll explain as I go but they all hold meaning for me in a way that I connect with my mom.

There are other features I have planned as well, things that will bring in more life, more memories, more of my mother’s spirit. I can’t wait to see it and share it. And I hope that some readers will find some inspiration to create a memory garden of their own, a place to plant rather than bury the memories of someone they’ve lost, so they’ll always be able to hold on to them.

Look again at that photo of my mother. That girl loved to garden and she taught me to love to garden. That girl deserves a garden. I’m going to give her one.

Lost in the Weeds

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