Beginner Gardening: Where did you get your love of gardening?, 1 by pirl

pirl wrote:
What beautiful stories!

My parents had hydrangeas, hollyhocks galore, roses and daffodils but it was my dad and my brother who tended the gardens, not my mom.

It wasn't until we moved to our second home that I had the pleasure of meeting our neighbor, Pauline Isabelle Reid Loeffler - the real PIRL. Her garden plot was between her home and ours. I spent a lot of time helping her and learning the reasons she did everything and how she did it. Keeping up her garden was a labor of love since it had been her late husband who planned it and originally planted it.

I'd awake each day to hear her sweet, soft, Southern voice singing hymns in the garden.

She died at 102+ and I'm grateful she got to see our gardens out here - 80 miles from where we first met.

Mrs. Loeffler was my friend, my "other mother", and my inspiration. Our lupines owe their place in our gardens due to her love of them. I still have the irises, yarrow and other plants she gave me and can't imagine calling what we now have "gardens" without them and her gift of the love of gardening, the most important of all.