Every August our massive Red Heart Rose of Sharon blooms at the entrance to our property.  It wasn’t pruned this spring – something about a massive, global health crisis unfolding, quarantines, kids schooling from home, can’t remember exactly – but the branches of this Hibiscus syriacus are still heavy with fleshy and flamboyant pure-white flowers with a rich, ruby-red blotch at the base of each petal.  It’s a timeless classic, and I mean that in more ways than one.

This particular tree came from the home of Minnie Sophia Cooper Digwood, who lived on Sibley Avenue in Old Forge, PA until her death in 1967.  She was the maternal grandmother of Brenda Ilchuk Unright, who I’ve mentioned in previous posts as the generous and quick-witted immediate past owner of our home.  She lived in our house with her husband Lou for almost 35 years, before selling it to us in November 2013.  They began their journey as husband and wife here, and she was a prodigious gardener who left us heaping beds of black-eyed susans, bee balm, tall phlox, hydrangea, sedum, lilies, hosta, ferns, gaillardia… all sorts of stuff.  I can’t even begin to imagine how hard it was to pass the keys to us when the time finally came.

Minnie’s dad was a shoemaker and her family hailed from London, but her husband John – Brenda’s grandfather – was born in Wales to a coal mining family from Abercarn, a small town in the Ebbw valley on the south-eastern flank of the once-great mining region of Glamorgan and Monmouthshire.  He emigrated to the United States with his parents in 1887 and became a coal miner as well, for the coveted anthracite of Pennsylvania’s Wyoming Valley, during the early part of the 20th century.  It was there he met Minnie, and they raised seven children (two more died in early childhood) on that single income until his death by sudden stroke in 1954.

Sometime in the 1980s, Brenda brought either a cutting or a seed pod from her grandmother’s tree at 314 Sibley and successfully transplanted it almost 200 miles from its home, to a knoll in our front yard in Delmar, where it explodes in every direction with hundreds of blooms whether I tend to it or not… but it always does better when I do. Sort of like my family.

I wasn’t terribly surprised to discover that Minnie’s tree is also referred to as Shrub Althea.  Althea is the name we gave the 2,000 lb. iron dragon that sits on our family’s Wolf Lake property in Sullivan County.  Heather’s dad hired an artist from Bethel to build it and have it installed, lakeside, with huge, red, tractor-tail-lamp eyes that you can see from the middle of the lake. He had vision, he had the means, he had balls the size of the glacial erratic boulders of Estonia.  And he too loved to garden, often and loudly, like a wrestler playing hurt.

Another timeless classic.

When I was in undergrad at SUNY Albany, my Romantic Poetry professor (the great Helen Regueiro Elam) made me memorize a poem – any poem, she said – because “once you memorize it, it is yours forever – you own it.” I picked William Blake’s Ah! Sun-flower because it was short and Allen Ginsburg liked it.  I had no idea what it was about, or how a non-thinking life form could be weary of time, much less chaseth after sweet golden climes and all.

But now?  Now, I think I understand.