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You are here: Home Life in Blogs & photos A long line of Greenies

15/03/2007A long line of Greenies

As part of our going green' week, V-grrrl reveals that Spring Fever has struck Chez V.

I’m sure if we put some of our family DNA under a microscope, we’d be able to see a green thread spiraling through its helix. That’s because I come from a long line of Greenies.

My grandfather immigrated to the United States from Italy, started a nursery and worked as a gardener. His customers and clients included some of the wealthiest estate owners in New York. My grandmother’s vegetable gardens were mounds that swelled up out of the backyard because she was so fond of composting and adding “good black dirt” to her planting. I like to think she invented raised beds. You didn’t have to bend over far to weed her garden.

My Italian mother could grow anything. The problem was her tendency to nurture ALL plant life meant that our yard was not only really green—it was really overgrown. My mom was reluctant to pull plants up for esthetic reasons or cut them back too much. The front door of my childhood home was virtually inaccessible due to out of control yews and other foundation shrubs. My mom’s groundcover beds were shrouded in mystery. They swallowed baseballs, toys, and evidence of my siblings’ illegal beer drinking. Mom’s plantings were like a botanical Bermuda Triangle.


 

My father, an Irishman, was not too interested in landscaping but he had a passion for organic gardening long before organic gardening was upscale and hip. When I was little I saw it as downscale and dirty. I still remember my shame when the trucks loaded with composted horse manure would show up at our suburban house and dump their loads. My heritage may have been Green, but I was definitely Brown. Gardening is not in my blood. To compensate for this genetic defect, I married a Belgian Greenie and we have two Green offspring who love Belgium’s temperate climate, enormous public parks, carefully trimmed hedges, abundance of flowers, and ever green grass.

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