Garden Memories to Celebrate Mother’s Day

My parents were fantastic gardeners. Like all Brooklyn-born, city-dwelling Italian-Americans, they dreamed of living a quieter, more bucolic life “in the country”. So naturally, they flocked to the suburbs where they lavished lots of time and attention on their little backyard gardens. I’m certain the minute they moved into their house, my dad began to plan and plant his own vegetables directly into the ground. To be fair, his parents (my lovely, plump, little, non-English-speaking grandparents) had a very robust urban garden of their own in their concrete Brooklyn backyard. In raised beds, they grew peppers, several types of tomatoes, eggplant, cucuzza (snake squash, a.k.a. gagootz), green beans, zucchini, wine grapes, and figs.

Though I liked most of those things, I hated gardening as a kid. The insects were terrifying and the smell of manure was revolting. Plus we never planted the things that I really loved: corn, artichokes, oranges, and potatoes. Too bad for me that a yard which was less than 1/8^th of an acre on suburban Long Island would never yield any of those things. Thankfully, we had an amazing farm stand, DeRiso Farms in East Meadow, stocked with awesome locally-grown fruits and vegetables — corn and potatoes being two of them. For the better part of the 19th century, Long Island, with its rich, loamy soil, was known for potato farming and sweet corn that blew Jersey corn out of the water. (Heated rivalry between Long Islanders and New Jerseyans — you know where I stand)

My mom retired, pretty young, shortly after my dad died, and worked a few days a week at the farm stand to stay busy. She did light farm work, greeted customers, and made fruit baskets. When she finally found her footing after my dad died, she returned to her own garden, where it flourished under her expertly green thumb. She grew many of the same things, but living mostly alone, she had less need for the abundance of much earlier “harvests”. She dug up several beds once reserved for massive yields of tomatoes and planted ornamental shrubs, flowers, and trees. She created beautiful Mondrian-style garden beds and planted fragrant and unusual herbs as much for cooking as for beauty: lovage, lemon thyme, lavender, lemon verbena, tarragon, dill, 3 or 4 varieties of basil, chives, parsley, and rosemary. When the herbs went to flower, it was fragrant and beautiful and alive with bees. 

The vegetables that she continued to grow, albeit in smaller amounts — tomatoes, green beans, peppers, and eggplant — made an appearance at almost every meal. Her panzanella — a traditional salad with hunks of stale Italian bread, sliced red onion, lots of herbs, and of course, her sweet and juicy tomatoes — was a staple that saw many variations to keep it from becoming mundane. I loved when she’d swap out the bread and add oil-packed tuna and canned white beans for a sturdy lunch, or add tender, silky roasted red peppers from the garden for a bit of smoky sweetness. It was the first dish that made me fall in love with garden-fresh tomatoes. 

But her most iconic summer dish was her ciambotta — a Southern Italian vegetable stew that used tomatoes, green beans, carrots, and potatoes. Sweet, salty, savory, umami-filled, this vegetable stew was absolutely delicious, even on a sweltering summer evening. Unfortunately, it being the fat-demonizing ‘70s, my mom had a judicious hand with the olive oil. When I make it now, I freely drizzle away. A bit of fat adds so much flavor and the perfect mouthfeel. And whenever I make it, I am immediately drawn back to those hot, summery evenings, having dinner on the patio.

She’s been gone for a while now. But before selling her house, I was sure to dig up a few fragrant flowering plants that can survive the winter and come back year after year — lilac, peony, and lily of the valley — whose scents trigger profound memories of her.

Rosemary, a sturdy plant that you’d think was hardy enough to endure the cold, usually dies in late autumn, but the plant I’d dug from her backyard thrived for more than five years before finally succumbing to the winter cold.

I still have the chives I took more than 15 years ago, which return every spring. The sight of them breaking ground in late April is, in some small way, a reminder that she still feeds me today.

To all the mothers and mothers of mothers, Happy Mother’s Day.

Grace