One of my favorite hymns is, “In the Garden.” This song was sung at my great-grandmothers funeral, my grandmothers, and I’m sure it will by sung at my mother and fathers, as well as my own.
In the Garden
C. Austin Miles
“I come to the garden alone,
While the dew is still on the roses;
And the voice I hear, falling on my ear,
The Son of God discloses.
And He walks with me, and He talks with me,
And He tells me I am His own;
And the joy we share as we tarry there,
None other, has ever known.

     My great-grandmother, Ella Davidson, had a pretty flower garden. I was only eleven years old when she passed away, but I remember her hollyhocks, and a beautiful ‘Blaze,’ climbing red rose that grew on a white trellis at the corner of her house. My grandmother, Fern Brown, also had a beautiful flower garden. She had designated areas for dahlias, iris, day lilies, peonies, and miniature iris that surrounded her rose bed. She was an avid gardener, and would pour over her gardening catalogs all winter long, deciding what new plants would adorn her garden come spring. My dad, Bill Neibergall, was the gardener at our home while I was growing up and he still is today at ninety-two years old. My mom, Marilayne, ninety years old, dead heads the spent blooms from the flowers and cooks the vegetables from the vegetable garden and talk’s dad into new plants when they go shopping at the nursery. Dad does the planting, weeding, watering and fertilizing. Dad told mom one day that when he picks her a bouquet of roses, that’s how he says, I love you. After 70 years of marriage, that’s a lot of roses and a lot of loving. I feel so blessed to still have them both in my life.

     I too, am an avid gardener. I have always loved flowers; from gathering wildflowers as a child, to my collection of 50 rose bushes, and now to mostly container gardening, as the bending over or kneeling to the soil level has become almost impossible as my age and my arthritis advances. I love to garden. In Arizona we plant in early October and our gardens produce until June when the heat comes and scorches the blooms, although there are still many flowers who love the heat, the petunias, pansies, dianthus, lobelia, and alyssum, aren’t happy.

    If we have a frost, perhaps once or twice a winter, we cover the containers with sheets and they survive. But the vinca, Mexican bird of paradise, periwinkle, lantana, and most shrubs survive our 100-118 degree heat, giving us flowers the year around. What a blessing it is to live in Arizona, where we can garden the year around.