Sweet Violets

 The yard of the house I lived in as a girl was long and narrow, with a paved walkway down the centre that led to the trash bins, the back fence and the back gate into the alley. The alley itself was dirt and worked well for hopscotch. On the right side of the yard, just behind the back of the house, stood a single car garage. Behind that, again, was a huge old willow tree. My mother’s wash lines ran from the garage to the willow and from the willow to a post at the back of the yard. Behind the garage not much grew as it was shady, but there were, in season, clumps of small, hardy violets. A beautiful deep purple, they were very scented. My mother loved to hang clothes on the line above them as she said things came in from the line ‘smelling wonderful’.                                                                                                                                                                                                      

My mother was a determined gardener. On a trellis beside the house there was a clematis, one she had transplanted every time she and my father moved, and, as well, there was a bed of peonies and several rose vines of various lengths of thorns, the one with really vicious thorns beside the garage door. At the back of the property, to screen the alley, there was a line of flowering bushes – bridal wreath is the one I recall. I envied the children of the house across the alley as there were several of them to split what seemed to me to be endless amounts of yard work, including but not limited to policing the willow’s dead branches, cutting back the evil roses, sweeping, raking and, when I was older, cutting the grass. I don’t recall paying much heed to those violets.

Sometime in there the willow had to be cut down. It may have been damaged in a storm; I am not sure. My mother commissioned a post for her clothes lines and the new lines ran from the garage to the post. I don’t think my mother planted anything more except a new baby tree. But, when my parents decided to sell the big house in Windsor and move to our city, there was a firm directive to me to get out a trowel and some trugs and dig up enough violets that my mother could be sure some would survive to reach their new home. She also considered the clematis, but since their grandparents were moving two climate zones colder, my daughters persuaded their grandma to let them give her a new, hardy clematis that would thrive in Ottawa.

My parents’ new home was a bungalow on a huge lot, the original suburb having been on septic systems. It was painted white with a black front door and my mother immediately realized that it needed, indeed cried for, red geraniums and white in a border across the front. When she discovered a rhubarb patch, she was delighted, and she relished a back patio with the clothes line in easy reach. When she received a picnic table for a Mother’s Day gift, her pleasure was complete. The clematis was duly installed and lawn maintenance people hired. (Although if they did not arrive to my mother’s taste in grass length, I cut. And raked. And cut.) The violets were also duly transplanted, some at my parents’ place and some in a corner of my aunt’s backyard, the bit not taken up by the swimming pool.

Forward a number of years, and my aunt was being overrun by violets, she said. She dug the majority of them and firmly gave them to me. I brought them out here and planted a row of them in the low bush beside the cut lawn at the side of the house. And sort of forgot about them, except in the week or two that they flower and the scent is wafted across the grass.

 

The photos accompanying this essay illustrate that these violets are stubborn, take-charge flowers. Plant one and ignore it and you have a multitude. This week, as spring peeps up, they are front and centre in our lawn. And the scent is still wonderful.