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	Dr. Leda's Rose Journal

Dr. Leda, The Formative Years

By Dr. Leda Horticulture, O. R.

April, 2005

Recent studies reveal: Dr. Leda was raised by wolves!

I'll never forget the year my grandmother was cursed with the second most beautiful garden in town.

From my childish perspective, her yard was indisputably the most perfect and lush green paradise on earth. Not only was it abundant with charming flowers, it was a deliciously shady, sweetly fragrant, endlessly fascinating treasure chest of bird nests, butterflies, ladybugs, and smooth round pebbles that could fill a small girl's pockets like a sparkling cache of enchanted jewels.

But that spring, for the first time in ten years, the myopic ladies of the Buckhead Garden Society had overlooked Grandmother's wealth of easy climbing trees and secret hiding places. Instead, foolishly dazzled by tawdry novelty, they had awarded first prize in the annual Beautiful Garden contest to a newcomer named Miss Evalee Flanders.(Continued...)

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Dr. leda's back yard today: plenty of trees to climb

Because Miss Evalee, it turned out, had recently installed a great big flashy bed of the latest, trendiest, most garishly colored roses that money could buy. "It's not a real garden any more without plenty of brightly colored long-stemmed cutting roses," the president of the garden club had boldly decreed at the awards ceremony. And as much as my grandmother loved flowers, she simply could not abide the long-stemmed modern roses. She had stood up and marched right out of that meeting.

I was six years old, and my job that summer was to tag along behind Grandmother, untangling the hose while she watered her shrubs and perennials and plotted her revenge. "If you ask me," she would mutter darkly as she stormed through the beds, deftly swinging her hose over delicate pale blue lacecap hydrangeas, "Evalee's garden always looks like its corset is laced up too tight."

I would squat down to straighten a kink, then hurry to catch up  as she sailed along past billows of soft celery-green caladium and creamy white gardenias that wafted their heady fragrance on the breeze. "Mind your step, watch out for those little begonia shoots," she would call back to me, adding through clenched teeth, "Evalee's the one that ought to be wearing a tighter corset, if you ask me."

When we arrived in our rounds at the south fence, Grandmother would always pause, for one of her chief joys was peering over into the neighbor's rather unimaginative yard, clucking and sniffing and gleefully comparing it to her own superior creation. And this year the pleasure was especially acute, because that particular neighbor, a stern, practical little woman everyone called Nana Hoffman, had been a member of the Garden Society's panel of barbarously misguided judges.

Dr. Leda's front yard today: formal yet friendly

I had to stand on tiptoe to study Nana Hoffman's handiwork. Clearly, her idea of beauty was not the same as Grandmother's. In the Hoffman compound, severely pruned boxwood parterres lined formal gravel walkways that veered at sharp right angles to form precise geometric patterns of rectangles and squares. I searched in vain for a mysteriously winding, beckoning path; a friendly shade tree to climb; or a gracefully weeping shrub that could magically transform itself into a pirate ship or a castle. But all I saw were the stark square hedges of ordinary low boxwood.

I knew Grandmother would have reached for her smelling salts if I had pointed out that there was never a weed, never a brown leaf, never a single piece of stray gravel out of place in that yard. So I kept my observations to myself as, day after beautiful summer day, we saw Nana Hoffman out raking, hoeing, shearing, spraying, and otherwise intimidating her yard into an impeccable state of  propriety and  perfection. "Watch your hose," Grandmother would admonish sharply, as if to divert my attention from any possible inclination towards admiration.

And then one day we noticed the appearance of a ring of bright yellow marigolds, marching in precise martial formation like sentries heralding the arrival of another brand new addition to Nana Hoffman's geometry: several perfectly straight rows of evenly spaced, tall, stiff, wildly clashing rose bushes.

Inspired, no doubt, by Miss Evalee's vulgar but celebrated taste, Nana Hoffman had gone out and purchased a truckload of the showiest, most rigidly upright new hybrids the catalogs had to offer, and planted them right smack in the middle of her parterres. There was nothing subtle about them as the summer sun blazed down on their cheerful colors--none of which, according to Grandmother, had ever before existed in nature.

It's almost odd now, so many years later, how clearly I can recollect the details of that one particular summer morning. I can still picture the festive little rainbows that danced at the end of Grandmother's hose. I distinctly remember dodging a cloud of bumblebees as I peeked through Grandmother's sweet honeysuckle vine at our industrious little neighbor, who was wearing a pair of dark brown trousers and bending over her new rose beds with a trowel.

"Look," I remember saying quietly. "There's Nana Hoffman."

Grandmother, always the epitome of ladylike southern belledom in her pink linen dress with mother-of-pearl buttons and a wide-brimmed white straw hat, glanced up and murmured, "Where?" I remember that I pointed, and then I'm sure I recall a conspiratorial pauseŠfour, maybe five seconds. And suddenly, Nana Hoffman--and I'm absolutely sure of this, because I was looking right at her broad backside when the water hit it--leapt into the air and let out a blood-curdling shriek.

Dr. Leda's roses: abundant and charming

Next thing I knew, Grandmother was gasping and wringing her hands and calling out apologies. Oh, good heavens, what a careless accident! What a dreadful mistake! She'd been holding the hose and turned to say hello, not realizing that of course the hose was turning with her, and oh my lord have mercy, poor dear Nana Hoffman must forgive her, she must come over right away for a towel and perhaps a nice cold glass of sweet tea, with some fresh mint from the garden.

I don't think anyone noticed when Grandmother tapped my impressionable young chin with her finger. "Shut your mouth," she whispered. "It looks unattractive hanging open like that. And a lady, like a garden, should always be lovely and serene."

Then she took my hand and together, with our lovely lips sealed and our chins held high in the air, we strolled serenely to the house to fetch a dry towel for poor hysterical dripping wet Nana Hoffman.