My mother’s Garden

by Liz Cruz-Kaegi

Every now and then when my mind needs to rest, I close my eyes and travel to my sister’s porch in the north coast of Honduras. I sit alone, with a cup of coffee at six in the morning and enjoy the crisp air that comes after the fearsome storm of the night before. In front of me stands a dark blue looming mountain and next to the porch is my mother’s garden.

It is always summer in my mothers’ garden.

That is all I could think of the other day as I sat in a Philadelphia restaurant talking to a gentleman interested in introducing garden products to Central America.

The questions kept coming; I need the names of distributors, do you have a list? Should I translate the labels to Spanish? What about government regulations?

And all I could think of was, it is always summer in my mother’s garden.

Everything in life I believe can be reduced to asking the right question at the right time.
Maybe the question was not what are the names of distribution companies? But rather, do people in Honduras buy plants in nurseries? Do they buy mulch? How many times a year do they visit a garden store?

It is always summer in my mother’s garden. The flowers are blooming in January and it is green and lush year round. I’m sure my sisters buy plants once in a while, but more often than not they ask their neighbors for a cutting. Their thumbs are always green. Until I moved to the U.S., I lived under the illusion that I had a green thumb, not realizing that it was nature’s gift to my home not to me.

Can such an environment sustain a large nursery business?
Sadly, I didn’t find out. Sometimes people feel the only answer they need is in a list of names.

So tell me what do you think? I’m curious.

My Latin American friends, Is your mother’s garden always green? How many times do you buy plants from a nursery?

My friends from the north, how much do you spend in garden supplies every year?

Is your green thumb nature’s gift to you or to your place in the world? Or perhaps it is due to your garden center’s beautiful nurseries?

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