My Mother's Garden

My mother had a beautiful garden when I was a child and it provided a wonderful playground for me. It was so big and had such a variety of plants, flowers and trees that it has stayed in my mind ever since and has served as inspiration for some of my needlework, especially my landscape quilt wall hangings.
Our house was sitting in one corner of two lots and my mother had hardened the ground in the middle area by sprinkling it daily so that there was no grass in that area, just hard ground. This gave us an area where we had clotheslines and in the very middle of that area, she usually made a fire to heat water for washing in a large tub. Sometimes she would actually boil the sheets and whites, while moving them around with an old broom handle like it was a magic cauldron. In winter, wood would be burned to make charcoals to heat up our house. Old metal barrels wre washed and half filled with sand or dirt and charcoals were placed on top of the sand or dirt. These barrels were then placed inside the living room and the bedroom. The fire outside was kept on going and hot charcoals were brought in to our barrels throughout our day. I imagine this was the reason to dry this area and keep the grass from growing there.
Oh, but around this hardened area, my mother had trees scattered around the perimeter of the two lots. She had flowering trees near the house and some near our fence. She had some beautiful orchid trees in three colors, white, pink and lilac. These were called"patas de vaca" (cow's feet) because of the hoof shaped leaves. She had mulberry trees with fruit. The mulberry trees were also in three colors, based on their fruit--white, pink and purple. On one side, she had lilac trees with beautiful flowers and pomegranate trees ladened with pomegranates. Towards the far back of the property she had left a mesquite and a guisache tree that had been there for many years. There was plenty of shade all around.
My father had built a little storage tool house, using the metal from large cans opened up and nailed together. It looked like a metal quilt house. Next to this tool houise they had a grape vine which had been trained and shaped into a "summer house' over a wooden frame and the vines would hang like walls around the frame. I used to play in this arbor and in the wooden two person swing hung from railroad ties, which were square about 6 inches thick a nd which were the framework of the arbor.
Among and around the trees, my mother had planted many flowers of many kinds and many colors. The whole garden looked like a work of art when everything was flowering. She even had some weird flowering plants which looked like a flowering carpet near the house. It was really a beautiful place for me to play and has always been an inspiration in my art work all my life.