Memorial Garden

This year sucked for gardening. Between my knee recovery and the very wet followed by insanely hot and dry summer... I let things atrophy a bit. 

One garden that does okay is my birdbath garden. I plant annuals around the birdbath, because I keep trying and failing to amend the soil and things struggle to grow. I have worked in so many bags of Bumper Crop soil conditioner and it seems like it goes right back to being compacted, root-y, rock-y, walnut-poisoned dirt.

Fun fact: walnuts give off a compound called juglone, which poisons the ground within the dripline of the tree AND anywhere walnuts fall or even parts of them are transported by asshole squirrels. This garden is full of walnut leavings. There are lists of juglone-resistant plants, but even those seem to struggle a bit. Things end up stunted and anemic.

Yesterday, I was putting up the rest of a decorative/hopefully somewhat practical fence border behind my birdbath garden (I'm embarrassed to say I first started putting it up in July and half of it was languishing on the mulch at the side of the house...). I'm hoping it lends separation from the weedy wilds behind the somewhat cultivated part in front.

While I was trimming the highly invasive Autumn Olive to the left, I made a realization. 

This garden is my memorial garden. I have two separate statue things that I didn't connect until now.

 

The first is my Jizo. Someone told me about the Japanese Buddhist figures that represent protectors of children, especially children gone before they're born. They can symbolize the loss from miscarriage. It spoke to me.

Bryce got us a beautiful statue of a little boy Buddha with an open book in his lap after I miscarried the last time I was pregnant. I love that statue, but we didn't want anything to happen to it so he became an indoor statue. We pass him every time we go down the stairs. 

He's perfect right there. I still wanted something in the garden though, especially the birdbath garden I can see from my office. And so I got a Jizo, made of volcanic something that makes it very outdoor friendly. 

The other statue in my garden is a memorial stone my co-workers got me when my Grandma Rosemary passed away. The butterfly is bleeding rust a bit, but it's lasted a long time. 

I read it for the first time in a long time yesterday, and it struck me... It applies to our losses, too. Here it is, bigger, for ease of reading: 

When I read it yesterday, it reminded me of my losses. My two babylings, one wayward and one that wouldn't stay. They were so loved in those brief moments where we thought we'd gotten our miracle, and they are always, always in my heart. 

My birdbath garden has always been a bit of a meditative place, and I feel at peace when I'm working or admiring there. I keep trying to get pollinator plants to survive there -- we'll see how the salvia and agastache do when they (hopefully) return in the spring. The irony of my memorial garden filled with infertile soil that no amending ever seems to fix isn't lost on me. But I keep trying, and restarting each year so there can be pretty flowers, butterflies, and hummingbirds in the summer.