Where Lilacs Still Bloom (36 page)

She’d even tried her hand at bonsai lilacs. It offered quite the satisfaction, though she’d slowed down with her knuckles swollen with age now. But amazingly, Bill enjoyed working with bonsai beside Shelly. She watched her husband, slightly bent now, walk toward her. He waved a greeting, a smile fresh upon his aging face. He looked happy to see her, distinct among the plants. What wife could ask for more?

D
uring the Second World War, people started coming back to visit the garden. A whole new town had built up along the Columbia River called Vanport City, because it lay between Vancouver and Portland. Built on the flood plain, the city fast-housed workers needed to build ships. Fritz said thirty-five thousand people lived there close to Portland, the town springing up within weeks. On a Saturday or Sunday, many of those working in the shipyard—women too—took a break, and in May I’d find ready visitors at my picket fence. A few hours in the garden, a blanket spread at the grassy areas, watching and listening, gave rest to those worried about husbands and sons and grandsons in faraway places, took their minds from building things used to carry men to war.

Our lives kicked along like the can the children played with down the street. I passed the twentieth year following
Frank’s death, stunned that I could have gone on a minute, let alone all that time without him. The flowers were my ballast, that and faith that I’d be with Frank again and have so much to tell him when I was. I looked forward to it. Will Rogers used to say, “If you live life right, death is a joke as far as fear is concerned.” I had no fear of it; but neither did I wish to hasten its arrival.

Cornelia wrote me to say that a few of my lilacs were “listed in John Wister’s
Lilacs for America
, a tome much bigger than mine.” She wrote, “I checked, and there are fifty-one Klager varieties named.”

I called her on the phone when I got the letter, even though I didn’t much like spending that kind of money for long distance, but her words astounded me. “He included my lilacs, that many?”

“All the city-named ones are there, Klager Dark Red, Klager Dark Purple, Miriam Cooley—that’s the wife of the nurseryman, isn’t it?” I told her yes, and she continued. “Will Rogers and my personal favorite name you gave: Klager Large Dark Double Very Fine. No question of what that one looks like or how you felt about it.” She laughed. “Wister traveled extensively all across the country in 1941, surveyed classifiers from all the arboretums for the Arthur Hoyt Scott Horticultural Foundation. The book just came out this year.”

My lilacs, in a book with hundreds of others, but recognized individually. It was 1943, and you could have pushed me over with a lilac bloom, I was so surprised and humbled.

I missed Frank especially when, one day in 1947, I was invited to the Oregon State Federation of Garden Clubs to receive an award. I was eighty-three years old and getting honored for doing something I’d loved to do my whole life. It bothered me a little that it was Oregon giving me the award and not my beloved Washington where I’d done my plant breeding. Martha might have said that wish for different kept me from the consequences of hubris. I’d have been too proud if Washington had honored me. Lizzie drove me to Portland for the luncheon, and it was time with her as much as the award that got me ready, checking my new shorter haircut in the mirror, then covering it with my hat, after all. I wasn’t in love with the pads that broadened my already ample shoulders, but Lizzie had bought the coat for me, and I needed to wear it as the May day promised cool.

“For Distinguished Achievement in Horticulture,” the plaque read. I know my face burned with all the things they said about me and my work, especially knowing that I hadn’t done it by myself. “This is the first such an award we’ve given to a living horticulturist,” the president noted, the feather in her hat bobbing toward me as I sat in front looking out at people.

“Glad you didn’t wait,” I said, and everyone laughed.

Still, as they read the names of some of my now nearly two hundred cultivar varieties, I remembered my papa’s words about honoring a gift given. Horticulture. Imagine, me, a simple German immigrant with an eighth-grade education learning horticulture, letting the complexity of an apple or a lilac define my life and trusting that there was nothing new under the sun; we mortals are all drawn to simply unfold secrets, reading flowers like a book.

Before adjourning, there were pictures, and then Lizzie asked for help to haul in a galvanized tub of starts we’d brought with us, and all the members took home a lilac from the Klager Garden.

“Ich freue mich wie ein Schneekoenig,”
I told Lizzie as the women selected their starts.

“What does that mean, Mama?” she asked.

“I am as happy as a snow king.” My father used to say that.

The Oregon federation’s citation hung in the sun porch, so when I was frustrated with a failed start with a cloudy color or wimpy stem, I could be reminded of achievement, that word Martha would have told me meant “success by exertion, skill, practice, and perseverance.”

I didn’t do much hybridizing anymore. Mostly it was producing plants for commercial sale on Lilac Days that took
our time. Just keeping the garden ready for Planter’s Day took the rest of my effort.

Nelia drove up from Seattle the May I turned eighty-four, she and her friend, Benson, which was how she introduced him. She teased me when I said I’d had a few “friends” come my way too, through the years. “A jeweler from Portland bought several lilac starts, then came back, even when the lilacs stopped blooming,” I told her.

“A vibrant woman like you is attractive,” she told me. “You could marry again.”

“Oh, piddle,” I said.

“No, really. Didn’t that writer who cataloged lilacs marry late? To a woman who was also a horticulturist. I know I read that somewhere.”

“John Wister was seventy-three.” He called matrimony “the fatal plunge,” which I didn’t think spoke hopefully of his union. “I think Fritz might have driven my jeweler off,” I told them. “But that was fair play, I submit, since I’d driven off a few of his female interests too.” Nelia laughed, and so did her companion, a nice-looking man in his late forties, ten years younger than Fritz. “I had to check them all out, you know, make sure they were blooms worthy of keeping and not just young women chasing after a man close to fifty, but still looking tall and willing. I could see their good points but noticed a few flaws too. Of course, I had to let him know about them.” Nelia smiled. Benson nodded his head. He was
a handsome man and Nelia not too old to marry. I told them that, and she blushed. I’d gotten blunter in my old age, though Lizzie said I’d always been so.

“We’re both too busy for that.”

“Speak for yourself,” he said as he flicked lint from his pant cuff and adjusted his hat resting on his knee.

“Fritz has been faithful to you and this garden.”

“I submit, he has. I couldn’t have gone on after Frank died and couldn’t have recovered from that devastating flood of ’33 either, not without Fritz.”

I’d had a good life. Nelia reminded me of that.

It got better.

On a May morning in my eighty-fourth year, I came out to check my lilacs. The bushes with a blend I’d worked toward, a purple and white together, looked good and healthy and had opened up with the warm weather. I checked my City of Vancouver bloom. They looked good too, and lo and behold, there among the double whites was one with twelve petals.
Twelve!
I counted again. “Twelve,” I told Bobby. “Twelve petals on a double white.” I teared up then. That happened more easily as I grew older. “Oh, Frank, we did it, we actually did it.”

The fragrance was heavenly, as glorious as I’d imagined, but I could hardly contain my delight at the dozen petals curling at the edges, clustering, each keeping the other into the perfect bloom.

I called out to Fritz, didn’t want to cut the bloom just yet, wanted him to see it and the others on the bush, each with twelve too. I’d chosen right, hybridizing for the petal growth, crossbreeding plants that tended toward producing more than they ever had before. “Fritz!” I shouted again, and he came out of the house, still chewing on a piece of toast.

“What is it, Mama? Did you find a lilac that just has to be moved?” He coughed, something he did a lot of lately. He smiled, though, and as he stood beside me, he said, “What’s up?”

“This is what’s up.” I showed him the bloom. “Twelve. God’s given us twelve petals. Can you believe that?”

He brushed his toast-crumb hands on his pants, then held the bloom in his palm, his finger counting every petal. “Yup, it’s twelve. Congratulations. You better go tell Lizzie. She’ll be pleased for you as I am.” He coughed again, seemed short of breath.

“Are you all right?”

He brushed away my concern, nodded again toward the lilac, distracting, now that I remember. He smiled.

“This belongs to all of us,” I said. “And all those who’ll come by and get a start.”

I collected seeds from that lilac, and in the fall I planned to cut the suckers from the plant. I’d give a start to Lizzie and Roy and send packets of them to Cornelia, telling her they’d give up twelve petals and made sure that Nelia and
Ruth and all the grandchildren got some too. I’d tell them it was my crowning achievement. With that goal met, I wasn’t sure what I’d work toward now. I considered sending a seed packet to Luther Burbank’s widow. Why not? Even if he didn’t spend time on ornamentals, his wife might. Who couldn’t love a lilac with a dozen petals?

But I never got any of those packets sent off. Life intervened.