Where Lilacs Still Bloom Read online

  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, telli
ng 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.

  FORTY-FOUR

  SPLENDID SPACE OF GRACE

  Hulda, 1948

  In the foothills of Mount St. Helen’s, the snow was still many feet deep in May of 1948. Our Lilac Days had brought any number of new people to my garden, and I’d enlisted the grandkids and nieces and nephews and others to help out, serving lemonade and giving tours. The blooms were magnificent, perhaps the best I’d ever seen. There was a fair amount of attention paid to my double creamy white with twelve petals, and I worked on getting that same number in other varieties too. That’s what I told folks. “There’s always more to do.”

  Several people celebrated Mother’s Day by bringing the family to the gardens. Now that the war was over, Vanport, that city between Portland and Vancouver, housed veterans going back to school on the GI Bill. That was a good thing the government did, helping people further their education. We’d be lost in this world without minds staying bright and new ideas getting acted upon by those who study. The flowers offered a rest for others, even though it was a crazy busy day for all of us.

  Not long after Lilac Days, it warmed up still more. It reached eighty degrees, which was unheard of in Woodland for that time of year. I knew it meant that all that snow would melt and melt fast. I was grateful we had the dikes, as it wouldn’t be long before the rivers rose with snowmelt.

  On May 25 I had Fritz drive me up on the bluff, and we could see how that river was roiling and rising its way south. The radio announcer said the Willamette River flowing north through Oregon was rising too. If both of those rivers crested at the same time, Portland or portions of it would be flooded, giving our Lewis nowhere to flow. If the Columbia kept coming up beside Woodland, it would put pressure on the dikes. So far, it appeared that they’d hold.

  But on May 30, a railroad dike near Vanport broke, letting floodwaters pour through that city in minutes. We heard about it on the radio.

  “I wonder if we should think about moving lilacs,” I told Fritz. “Our dikes could break too.”

  “Tragic as it is, the breach at Vanport might keep the water from backing up and pressuring our levees.”

  I’d never known Fritz to be a wishful thinker, and I could see for myself that the dikes were leaking. The Lewis ran full and had nowhere to rage with the Columbia bloated with melt.

  I thought maybe I’d move my starts in the sun porch up to my bedroom, just to be safe, and maybe pull lilacs and put them on the rafts and secure them to the trees. Fritz agreed, but before we could get started, the siren blew, and we got a call. “Tomorrow they’ll try a forced breach, hoping to keep the floodwaters out of town, but the dikes are going to go,” we were told. “Get to high ground.”

  I grabbed a few cultivars, my purse. Fritz grabbed plants too, and we pushed the cats into a pillowcase where they wouldn’t see what might be fearsome, and we could haul them with us. Fritz pushed the chickens into the haymow in the barn, put Bobby and the cats in the car. I looked around. Too late to move things upstairs. These were only “things.” It was the outside that I’d take with me if I could, all the tight plantings of lilies and peonies and lilacs and roses and rhododendrons and magnolias and poppies and on and on.

  I stepped outside to Fritz’s calls and gave a nod to them all. Maybe we’d survive another flood; maybe the planned break would save us from a deluge. Maybe not.

  We stood on Goose Hill looking west toward Woodland on May 31 when the river took the dikes. There’d been talk about blowing the dike with dynamite in an effort to “control” the damage, but the dike burst before they could decide. Hubris, I thought to myself. I’d thought the sound would be louder. But it was muffled by the screams and gasps of those watching as the wall of water surged in like ocean waves, rolling barns and houses like small tops, bobbing people’s lives and livelihoods beneath the muddy water. We couldn’t see our home, but there was no need to. Everything we could see was flooded. No dikes nor land formation rise between the Lewis River and the Columbia to stop the water now. My garden bloomed between those rivers, and I knew it would be gone.

  Lives were lost in Vanport, but not in Woodland. As expected, my garden was submerged beneath the dirty river water for six weeks. Lizzie and Roy’s home wrestled with water in the basement, but the mild weather meant they didn’t need their furnace on and could wait until the water went down. Fritz and I stayed with them, which was good. Fritz didn’t look so well. Seemed to have a hard time breathing, but he walked across the street to see Roland’s new baby, his great-nephew. Roland had married that pretty Betty Carlson a while back, a former princess of Planter’s Day fame. Just the effort of crossing the street tired Fritz.

  “You’d better go see Doc Hoffman.” He looked pale, too.

  “I’m fine, Ma. I don’t like doctors any more than you do. Besides, he’ll be busy with flood victims needing tending.”

  “Ach,” I said, annoyed at him. My children could be so stubborn. I didn’t know where they got that from.

  People talked for weeks about whether they should have blown the dike, and if they’d gotten that decision made sooner whether it might have helped, but it was senseless talk. Looking back to visit blame and accusation is wasted time, even if you could win the lawsuit. Such time spent finding fault was better spent pressing the goal: learn how to manage living between two rivers that flood every now and then, even with man-made dams and levees and dikes.

  They began letting a few people at a time step into rowboats to visit their houses—if they still stood—and get essential things out they thought they needed. Or maybe to give relief to those who’d taken us flood victims in. Even herds of cows were turned out into growing fields because there was nowhere for them to graze, the Bottoms just water now.

  Fritz didn’t feel well enough to row me out there, but I wanted to go, so Roy and my grandson took me, Bobby panting in the bow.

  It was a moving lake we rowed upon, worse than the flood of ’33. Debris, branches, leaves, parts of other people’s buildings jammed up against the barn, the woodshed, the house. A whole passel of logs washed from the mill yard floated, and Roy said, “We’ll have to get a bunch of guys to push those back, or they’ll jam against the house and move it from the foundation.”

  We rowed right over the tops of my lilacs, the leaves and branches whispering along the bottom of the boat. Petals floated in the water, silent tears, drifting. I looked for places where I knew shrubs were supposed to be, where my oldest lilacs were planted, and couldn’t see anything as we rowed over those areas. Cranes called beyond the railroad dike still seeping water. The smells of rot rose up in what had once been a palace of sweet aromas. Roy rowed up to the porch, and from the boat he pulled open the door to the house. Water stood in the hall and partway up the steps to the bedrooms. Since we’d raised the house three feet and three feet stood in the hall, overall we had over six feet of water everywhere the eye could see.

  “I think this is as far as you should go, Grandma,” Roland said. “Just looking is enough, isn’t it?”

  “I’m not going to piddle around with all your effort and not go up there,” I told them. I wiggled my way out of the boat, and Roy helped me steady my foot on the step covered with water. The cool of it washed against my rubber boots. I walked up out of it to the second floor. I’d taken a few starts up there before Fritz said we had to go, but mostly, it being May and everything being planted for Lilac Days, there were no lilac starts. I looked around that room, sat on the bed surrounded by musty smells and damp clamming up from downstairs. Bobby bounded up the steps behind me.

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p; “Leave me here for a bit,” I yelled down to Roy. “Check out the barn and the chickens.” We’d brought along corn for them.

  I heard him slosh away and just sat on the bed. The water would eventually recede. There’d be mud to clean up, and I hoped the house hadn’t been pushed off kilter by the water. We’d have a roof over our heads, which was more than many had. Twenty-thousand lost their homes in Vanport; sixteen lost their lives there.

  But what of the garden? Did I have the strength to once again renew it? And with what? The lilac bushes were underwater—many plantings would have been washed away by the impact of the river, ripped up by waves or the logs that jammed and clustered. Only the tallest, oldest trees looked like they’d made it. I had three hundred plants chucked into my garden design for Lilac Days. There wasn’t a one that would survive standing in water for weeks. I looked out the window where my Magical Three Lemoine should have been. “Oh Frank,” I said. That’s when the tears began.

  It was after the Fourth of July before the water receded and the mud dried enough that we could walk around the house, see what we could see.

  Not a plant in sight. Not a one. Every cultivar of lilac, gone. Even the few we’d pulled and laid on rafts tied to the tree were gone along with the rafts. The monkey puzzle tree made it, a couple of magnolias that were big and sturdy. The ginkgo tree. But otherwise, the land was barren as Abraham’s wife before her miracle birth. It would take a miracle to redo this garden, and I did not have it in me. Inside the house, in the sun porch, my cultivars and all the seed packets were washed away too.