Rose Garden

One ordinary, lazy weekend afternoon, as my wife and I talked about plants and vegetation and greenery, my thoughts suddenly drifted to memories of my mom's rose garden. Memories have an uncanny way of intruding into consciousness at the oddest hours and via the most ordinary stimuli.

When the family moved into its own home in Las Piñas in the early 70's, in what was then a sleepy, rural town south of Manila, famous for its salt beds and a church organ made of bamboo, and where one could still see rice fields and grasslands and open spaces, Mom discovered she had a green thumb.

The original house, before it was expanded in 1976, was a small, boxy, two-bedroom affair, but with a rather large lot compared to today's working class houses. Dad, the son of farmers, had a knack for growing vegetables, and so on one side of the lot we had kalabasa and sitaw; at the back we had kamatis and talong. On the lot's other end we had an atis tree, a calamansi, and two prolific trees each of papaya and kamias.

Mom's domain was ornamentals and, naturally, the lot's front was hers. Our front lawn had the nicest, luxuriant grass, similar to what can be found on a golf green. We had an interesting dwarf palmera near the garden tap; two dwarf coconut trees on the left and right sides, a row of santan and a shrub with a name I can't quite recall, with leaves that turned white at the edges, as if they had been painted. And then there was Mom's rose garden.

It occupied a rectangular plot in front of the house, and was about five meters long and a meter wide. A rather small area, admittedly, but during its heyday it teemed with some of the most beautiful red and white blooms. Mom obtained the plantings from kin, with some tips and advice thrown in. The rest was natural ability, which surprised many, including Mom herself, I think. The rose garden turned my brother Benjie and I into celebrities on the school bus. The girls we rode with would often request us for roses, pleading with us for Mom's beautiful blooms. We naturally didn't want to disappoint them and, riding on the wave of our newfound popularity, cajoled Mom into letting us pick some of her prized reds and whites.

Mom took good care of her rose garden, spending many afternoons removing weeds, loosening the soil, and plucking dead leaves from the stems. She also kept a sharp eye out for pests, always preempting them thru careful detection of their telltale signs. Afternoons was when Mom worked in her garden. She always donned work gloves, and used a trowel and shears. While she went about her business, Benjie and I would play on the grass, usually wrestling each other, or playing catch-me-if-you-can. At other times we would just be near Mom, like chicks to their mother hen, and helped her prune her roses when she asked us to.

Benjie and I have the clearest recollections of Mom's rose garden, as our other siblings were very young then. We are from the Popeye, Beany and Cecil, and Gumby era; our younger siblings, from Sesame Street and Voltes Five. They had no idea then who Godzilla and Mothra were, and probably thought The Green Slime was the ectoplasm in Ghostbusters.

The time of Mom's rose garden was the time I was becoming more aware of our own little world: Mom tending her blooms, us children whiling our sweet, carefree time by endless play; Dad getting home from work, and then the family having dinner together. Over steaming rice and Mom's delicious dishes we had a very fluid agenda. Dad talked about office events and gossip; Mom, about what she did at home and, neighborhood gossip. I wanted to talk about my school bus crushes but never dared to, and so told Mom that I had additional requests for her blooms. Benjie listened and seconded anyone when he felt like it; Benson had a timid appetite and would only take in a morsel or two. He regularly dozed off at the dinner table, exhausted from the school day. Belinda loved veggies at an early age, and was Dad's and the family's little girl. Brian always had a good appetite! He sat to my right, and between us were the drinking glasses and the Magnolia Milk bottles or the plastic orange juice containers of ice cold water. We were the water boys at dinner.

Routines. We lived them day in and day out, never realizing, until now, that they were in fact some of the happiest moments of our lives.