Blooming this Week in Rogers...at the home of Ron &Lois Porter- About us

Somehow during the last twenty-seven years of our marriage and courtship Ron and I became gardeners. When we began, we knew very little. Ron had grown up in the suburbs; I grew up in the inner city of Minneapolis. My mother had always planted a few flowers in the back yard and had shrubs in the front. My fondest memory is the two shrub roses she had on either side of the sidewalk leading to the front door. They had fat pink roses on them in the spring, and huge nasty thorns on the stem which discouraged neighborhood children and us from plucking them.

We bought our first house two blocks south of where I grew up on a bus line. Homeownership comes with many challenges, but we were excited and happy to have our own property. The first year we struggled with high interest mortgage payments.  We were able to refinance the second year and began to work on the inside of the house. The outside we just did the minimum. No one near us seemed to be into beautiful gardens or even a patch of flowers. The exception was our next door neighbors to the south. Their entire backyard was a vegetable garden. They had the only flowers (marigolds to discourage bugs) on the block; this was a clue. Later, when I became a realtor, I always looked at landscaping in neighborhoods. It helped me place a neighborhood on my inner “nice” scale. Nice neighborhoods take care of the outside of their property. The state of, or lack of gardens tell a lot about the desirability and security of a neighborhood; we begin to realize that “location, location, location” is a cliché we should have taken more seriously.

We had been there almost two years when a SWAT team cordoned off our block and shot out the street lights.  I never really got the details of what was going on. I had been out all day and when I returned I discovered I couldn’t get home, and a city bus had been pulled up around the corner as a “command center”. We discovered later that the disturbance was centered on the house next door to ours (to the north of course). We discovered this when we tried to sneak home by way of the alley when we met a SWAT team member with a large rifle who told us to “get the * out” of there. We had been at choir rehearsal at the church around the corner. Ron was playing organ and directing the choir at the small Baptist church we belonged to at the time. By year three we were trying to figure out how we could sell the house and move to the country, or suburb or even just twenty blocks south.

The only thing we ever planted there were marigolds that Ron put in the ground directly from the container without separating the individual plants, and three small decorative crabapple trees in the back yard. The marigolds grew in a big messy clump, and we left the crabapple trees two summers after he planted them. One of them had been broken in half by a vandal one winter. Ron taped it back together and miraculously, though wounded it continued to grow. It didn’t bloom like the other two but it fully leafed out and seemed to be the strongest of the trio. There is a lesson to be learned from that tree. Those three trees were the only thing I missed when we finally moved.

Through circumstances that were divine, we were able to move to a foreclosed property in Burnsville. It was a wreck, but a livable wreck in a beautiful neighborhood. It was there we began learning about perennials and shrubs. We had a beautiful flowering crab in the front yard. Next door, the Japanese lilac was in full bloom the week we moved in. Over the next eighteen years, in that home and later in Rogers, we began learning more and more about plants and each other.  

A year before we moved to Burnsville, my brother had bought a house there from a woman who must have been an avid gardener. One spring when we were there relaxing on his deck I noticed this explosion of color and texture in the beds around his house and in the back. I asked him where he got all of those glorious plants. He just shrugged and said they just “came up on their own”. I then began really looking at other people’s gardens that I admired. I realized that most of these gardens had lots of flowers that “came up on their own”.  I also began to see the beauty of foliage. I saw how the texture, height and color worked in concert to present an overall theme.   Ron and I took the plunge and paid four dollars apiece for three hostas without bloom. We had discovered the miracle of dividing.

From those first three hostas we gained nine beautiful plants that bloomed the following summer. Our experience led us to convince my brother to let us dig one of his boulder size hostas from his yard and take it home. For this, we would dig up the other boulder size hosta, divide it for him and put it around his deck. Cutting plants apart and making new plants which grow as big as the first plant in a year or so is such a bargain. My mother and brother all still have hostas that came from the house in Burnsville. 

After much internal debate and wishful thinking I found myself in a garden store one summer, and told the girl behind the counter that I wanted to make a perennial garden. We had bought these trees for the back yard and I wanted to extend the garden all around the line of the fence. The saplings would be focal points and be somewhat protected from my kids running over them.  I also hated seeing grass grow along the chain link fence. It’s such a pain to edge. I didn’t know what I was planting, but I told her what kind of sun the area got and that I wanted low, middle and high plants.  I left the store with $60 of little black pots with sprigs of green in them. There was not a flower on anything.

We cut in the bed, using a manual sod cutter I rented. I started cutting by myself and almost gave up completely. The ground was hard and dry and it was slow going. Fortunately, Ron home from work saw my problem immediately. He got out the sprinkler and let it run over the area for an hour or so. With the ground completely saturated the cutter worked like it was supposed to and we removed rug like pieces of grass and got to work planting. Even without a wisp of a colorful bloom beside shades of green, it was beautiful. It curved in front of the chain link fence and it brought to our yard a sense of peace and tranquility. The little plants continued to grow all that summer. No flowers, but I expected that. The girl at the garden store had warned me that the first year these small plants needed to put down roots.

Early next spring the garden we had put in came back. I didn’t know what I expected to see. I was entranced by the view. I was on the phone with my mother right after looking out the kitchen window. I had to share it with someone. In the freshness of the morning the bed containing my little plants looked like an artist’s palette with spots of green in many hues and sizes all popping out of the ground. It was magic. I had done absolutely nothing outside, and yet, we had a garden coming up on its own. Later, I would see blooms and marvel at the colors that the little plants held in secret in the early spring. I won’t ever forget my pleasure at seeing those plants fulfilling their promise.

In the following years we began to spend more time working in the garden and learning about plants. We moved from Burnsville to Rogers fulfilling our dream of having a house on acreage in the country. I wanted a “view for my soul. We have that and more. We love it here, and we love to have visitors.

You are always welcome. Lemonade, sweet tea and sitting a spell in the garden is good for the soul.

Lois