Where Lilacs Still Bloom

by Jane Kirkpatrick

  But Fritz, bless his heart, he said we should at least try to clean up the area, maybe plant a few petunias, get dahlia and tulip bulbs. “Write to Nelia. She might … have bulbs to spare,” he said. My boy’s breath was labored. He couldn’t do the work, and while I could do some, I was old. Those were the facts that worked against our reclaiming this garden. Fritz had seen the doctor, but he told me it was just “aging” and not for me to worry, not that I’d stop. A mother hovers. I didn’t want to outlive yet another child.

  “I can do all things through Him who strengthens me,” I told Lizzie, quoting Scripture. “But let’s just clean the house.”

  And so we began with volunteers not committed to critical rebuilding of the dikes and shoveling mud elsewhere. Nelia’s dad, the Reeds, my grandkids and their friends, Roy and Lizzie, my nieces and nephews still in the area. We cleaned the house out, and the work was hard. I couldn’t see how Fritz could continue. There was no way I could replant now. “There’s a time to begin and a time to quit,” I told him. “That may not be a proverb, but it ought to be. I can live in the house, and that’s good enough. Forget the garden.”

  “You’ll die without your garden, Mama,” he told me.

  And then on July 28, Fritz did.

  His heart failed, Dr. Hoffman said. The man had retired the previous year, but he came when I called him to tend to my son. Like Martha and Delia, Fritz went in his sleep. I wondered what it meant that I outlived all but one of my children. Had I drawn all their strength, sapped them all and Frank’s too?

  We buried Fritz in the Independent Order of Odd Fellows cemetery where everyone in Woodland ended up. Lizzie invited me to stay with her and Roy permanently. “Let the garden be now. It’s too much,” she said. We sat in her living room—that’s what they called the parlor now.

  She was right. I used my hoe to balance in the yard, my cane everywhere else.

  “You’re rebuilding too,” I said. “Roy’s store’s got water in the basement still, and there’s work to do at your house. You don’t have time for looking after me. Besides, I sleep best in my own bed. Mold I can live with, at least a little of it. And putting my hands in dirt, that’s healing, Lizzie. You know that. I’ll just have a few pansies and such in pots on the porch.” She nodded. “I remember once Martha telling me about some word called therapy, what people were saying was a way to move toward healing without herbs and medicines and such. It’s a word that means a service, attending. ‘I wait upon,’ Martha said. So I wait upon the Lord to lead me back into service, back into ‘attending’ as He wants. Maybe just a few plants on my sun porch. Not the garden, no, I agree. But I need to go home.”

  “Will you let us convert the parlor into a bedroom, so at least you won’t be going up and down the stairs? And put in indoor plumbing, so you can avoid the privy?” Lizzie said.

  “Well, all right.”

  “And you can’t be alone here. Irvina said she’d come, she and her Mac.”

  “Or I could get another high-school girl to help. Either way, the garden is done. The rivers have won.”

  “I didn’t know it was a competition, Mama,” Lizzie said.

  “I only meant that the rivers have been my adversary since I first began; the rivers and rabbits and coyotes and moles and whatnot, all wanting part of my garden.” I shook my head. “And for what have I struggled against them? To grow a few lilacs.”

  “You’re older; you could have a heart attack too, you know.”

  “I deserve it,” I said.

  “Mama!”

  I smiled at her when she shook her finger at me. “I have to have a little time to remember all that Fritz and I did on that place after the last flood.”

  I needed to honor him with my memories, my son who had stayed faithful to me and even at the end had been the lift in my spirit that said we could start again. Maybe he’d understand that flowers on the porch could be enough.

  The first starts arrived by mail. Cornelia sent them, all packed with roots covered with dirt and kept moist by a piece of tarp wrapped around them. “For your garden,” she wrote. “I heard you lost your lilacs.”

  Well, that was sweet. I set them in a tub on the porch. A few days later Nelia drove up with Benson, and she had several starts taken from Jasmine’s grave, she said. Her father had kept them living. And he’d gotten a few cultivars of other varieties I’d given him for helping out, and she brought starts of those too. Nelia helped the high-school girl and me put water in tubs. I didn’t need girls now for garden help, but it was still nice to share a conversation with someone over breakfast, wish sweet dreams when we turned off the lights at night.

  “We could just plant them,” Nelia said.

  “Oh, no, they’d be lonesome out there. Let’s just leave them here.” I sat in the rocker, not sure what to do.

  Then cultivars from the garden club in Oregon arrived. I guess they checked with the mayor who told them the garden had been wiped out. City lilacs, as I think of them, showed up too, some as full bushes dug up and brought by truck from Kelso and Kalama, Gresham, and Silverton. Then Ruth wrote and sent starts from her Chrystle graduation lilac and others I’d sent her through the years. My grandchildren all brought a start from their gifted plants. Then the Snyder family called long distance to say they’d heard about the flood and wanted to send starts from the lilac planted at Arnold Arboretum bearing my name. Shelly said she’d contacted Lowthorpe School, and they had Klagers there and would send seeds next year.

  “Lizzie!” I said into the phone that worked again. “You need to come over here. It’s … You won’t believe … Something miraculous is happening.”

  The banker, the chief of police, that Japanese artist now living in New York, the son of the jeweler who had passed on too, they all sent cultivars of different varieties and then came others, trickling in, from people who’d visited. Treasures appeared, from children whose parents said they had Klager lilacs in their backyard picked up as discards one sunny afternoon outside our gate. Dozens and dozens of lilacs arrived, so many the postman said he’d have to find a special room to hold them when the mail truck delivered them too late in the day.

  My porch overflowed.

  Lizzie’s eyes gazed across all the starts that my new high-school girl had put into galvanized buckets sitting like lily pads in the pool of what had once been my garden. But there were bulbs too and seeds and still more lilacs I could yet work with a new variety. It might take a few years, but I thought I might even get the twelve petal double creamy white again. It would just take time.

  The three Lemoine that started my adventure so long ago were gone, but the offspring, the next generations, were coming back to me as gifts! My Favorite, Martha’s creamy white with the yellow center, so many more! I had no hope that I’d get all 254 varieties back, but the numbers didn’t matter. It was the circle of service coming full, all of those starts “attended” through the years in yards by generations of people I neither knew nor met.

  “We have to plant them,” I said. “I don’t know how we’ll keep them up, but we have to.”

  Lizzie nodded. “It is amazing, just amazing.” She had tears in her eyes.

  “We might be ready for Lilac Days by 1950,” I told her.

  “Nineteen fifty?” Lizzie said. “That’s only two years away.”

  “We’ll tell everyone of how the lilacs were restored by people giving them back. I am so humbled, so humbled.” I was crying too. “I will remain here where I belong. I will devote the rest of my life in rebuilding the garden. I have faith!” I said.

  My daughter and grandchildren would help. I’d begin with the flatiron-shaped patch at the front by the porch: the symbol of beauty and work, what a garden is all about as it gives to its gardener, as it gives to the rest of the world.

  EPILOGUE

  Hulda, 1950

  Letter for you, Grandma.” Irvina picked the envelope from my latest Bobby’s mouth, where he’d learned to carry it, saving me a few steps. The child w
ent back to ironing my sheets, well, hers too. There are standards to keep, after all, though of late I wished she’d quit piddling with work and just sit a spell with me.

  I looked at the postmark on the envelope. August 21, 1950. “It’s from Santa Rosa, California. I don’t know anyone down that way.”

  We’d had our grand opening of the Lilac Days earlier that spring with several thousand people coming by, marveling at the recovery. We showed photographs of what it had looked like after the flood. Every building in town posted pictures, their tenants knowing it’s important to remember both the hard times and how we came through them. The tour guides told stories of people returning lilac varieties, asking each group if anyone might have a start they’d gotten years previous, and if so, might we have a snip of it. It was a grand day, and all of Woodland could feel pride in what they’d done helping restore the community to its quiet splendor, lilac fragrance wafting over Horseshoe Lake and all the town proper. On the tours I led with my cane, I always reminded them that “life is worthwhile when it holds some beauty. It needn’t be flowers. It can be helping other people—that’s beautiful.”

  I held the letter. It was a fat packet. A return address didn’t include the sender’s name. I slipped my old yellowed nail along the glue, and it flipped open. Inside was a paper packet with seeds. And a letter.

  In my continuing effort to catalog my late husband’s notes and affairs, I often come upon correspondence I’ve overlooked. Enclosed is a letter and packets of seeds sent to me by Fritz Klager in 1948 from a double creamy white lilac with twelve petals that he said you hybridized. That’s quite an accomplishment, and while I was tempted to keep and plant these—there is a small lilac grove that Mr. Burbank planted many years ago; it was one of the ornamentals he liked—I decided it would be better to keep his lilacs as they were when he died and return these seeds to you, knowing that one can never have enough seeds to replant.

  Sincerely yours,

  Elizabeth Burbank

  The Washington State Federation of Garden Clubs held their annual meeting of 1958 in Seattle, and I was to receive their prestigious award. Lizzie couldn’t drive me this time; she passed on in 1956. I’d outlived all my children and my brothers and sisters too. I did wonder now and then about Barney Reed suggesting I wasn’t doing the Lord’s work in my garden and if the price I paid was burying so many of those I loved. But my father’s words came to me with greater force, and I found no sin in pursuing what I loved and embellishing beauty and giving the results away. Suffering, I decided, happened, and so did good things, and the issue of God’s power was not so much in questioning why He didn’t stop floods or death but in all the rest of the time when He showed us how to be hospitable, generous, and loving.

  I took special pleasure in receiving the Washington State Horticultural Award. They let me tell stories of a few lilac varieties, the highs and lows of gardening they related to. I made them laugh, which I always like to hear, then answered questions about the restoration after the flood and was careful not to go on too long the way we old women who love to talk about our gardens can. I wished my Frank was here to see the award. I said as much, and then tears pressed against my eyes when the federation president said it was astounding that I developed all those varieties from just three surviving Lemoine.

  Astounding, yes; and a miracle when a young mother with faith felt worthy enough to keep lilacs blooming.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Hulda’s story continued on past 1958. For two more years, she worked in her garden. After Fritz’s death, she invited her granddaughter Irvina and her husband, Mac Van Eaton, to live with her and take care of her, and upon her death she would give them the farm. These younger relatives happily did so. Not long after Irvina’s death at the age of fifty-one, Mac remarried. He and his new wife, Edith, remained caring for Hulda until she died in 1960, two months before her ninety-seventh birthday. Hulda’s later years included care from family but especially three generous women: Elma, her beloved niece; Irvina, her granddaughter; and following Irvina’s death, Edith, her grandson-in-law’s second wife.

  For some time after Hulda’s death, Mac and Edith stayed on in the house until their age and health required that they reluctantly sell. The gardens became overgrown. No one came for Lilac Days anymore without the hope of seeing Hulda’s strong frame beside her beloved flatiron garden. A developer moved into the old farmhouse where all of Hulda’s grandchildren were born, but he had no interest in the garden. Fewer people remembered her amazing gifts; her life and her work faded into history. Then came the rumor that the land was to become apartments, and the house and garden would be gone forever.

  Ruth Wendt, in her delightful book Those Wonderful, Annoying, Industrious, Ambitious, Busy, Stubborn, Determined, Caring, Clever, Talented, Gracious, Intelligent, Focused Women: The Story of the Hulda Klager Lilac Society, chronicles how a group of dedicated women, including Alice Wallace Schiewe, granddaughter of Hulda’s sister, Bertha; descendant Betty Mills; Ruth Lane; Irene Stuller; Crystal Schultz; and Daisy Grotvik—all Woodland Garden Club women—put their heads together and worked tirelessly to reclaim the Klager property and help establish the Hulda Klager Lilac Gardens. Using all those adjectives in the title of Ruth Wendt’s book, the women saved the gardens and began the restoration to what is seen today, bringing to mind John Wesley’s words about passion and people coming to watch one burn. These women also spearheaded the National Historic Site designation for the gardens, a task completed in 1975. The gardens have welcomed hundreds of thousands of visitors ever since.

  For many years, people visited and purchased starts, as they had in Hulda’s later years. These funds and volunteers allowed the garden to be maintained. But with twenty-five thousand visitors a year, finding a way to keep up with the demand for starts gave way to new science and tissue-culturing methods. This new practice allows many more starts to be available for sale each spring to the bus-tour visitors from all over the region and individuals who come from around the world to see this splendid space of grace.

  Thousands of hours of volunteer time prepares annual Lilac Days that honor the Lilac Lady of Woodland, as Hulda became known. Blooms begin in mid-April and end around Mother’s Day in May. Today, scouts and teens and retired service groups join the friends of the society and the board and volunteers participating in caring for the garden. The scouts are especially busy on Woodland’s “Make a Difference Day” and are reminiscent of Hulda’s bucket boys hired to water the more than one thousand plants within the garden. Hulda’s home is open for viewing during those first two weeks of the lilac season, and the gift shop offers garden-related items for sale along with lilacs, including bonsai varieties.

  Hulda’s amazing ability to develop over two hundred fifty varieties of lilac from crossbreeding her Magical Three of the surviving Lemoine is considered remarkable. Her lilacs are part of collections at Arnold Arboretum at Harvard, Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, and the Havemeyer estate near New York City, among others. Her connection with Luther Burbank is based on fact. More of Mr. Burbank’s life and his influence on horticulture at the time can be found in an exceptional book by Jane S. Smith, The Garden of Invention: Luther Burbank and the Business of Breeding Plants. Hulda did begin her work with apple hybridizing, moved to daffodils, dahlias, and tulips, and then to lilacs. From the list of variety names, one can speculate about prominent people Hulda corresponded with, such as Will Rogers, as well as many plants named for people whose stories few know: Alice, Carmine, Cora, among others. Hulda did write her article about dredging and was a regular attendee of the community Bible study led by the Seventh-Day Adventists and faithfully attended the Presbyterian church. The characters of Nelia, Ruth, Shelly, Jasmine, Barney, and Cornelia are all fictitious but meant to invoke the distinctive range of people Hulda touched and whose generosity later helped restore the Klager garden. The Lowthorpe School was a real institution, and Wister did include a number of Klager lilac varieties in his famous book publish
ed in 1943. The descriptions of lilac varieties are taken in part from the article “The Hulda Klager Lilacs Reviewed” by Freek Vrugtman, registrar of the Royal Botanical Gardens, Hamilton, Canada, published in the summer 1999 issue of Lilacs. The review includes the most extensive listing of Hulda’s lilacs on record.

  Hulda was an ordinary woman with an extraordinary ability not only to see the details within individual plants so that she could breed for hardiness and resistance to disease in addition to color and size and scent, but also to imagine something more than the tiny pollen at the end of her turkey feather or smallest brush. Her dedication to detail and the specifics of science and her artful imagination are what drove her to develop more and more varieties. I like to think it was a gift she was given that she enhanced through study, determination, patience, and love. That she found comfort through flowers during the great many losses in her life is pure speculation on my part; but given her generous spirit and how the garden was rebuilt after the flood of 1948, I think it is speculation well founded.

  Few records exist from Hulda’s experimental work. Frank did make tags for her, and her grafting knife, hoe, and hat are ephemera that memorialize her life’s work. Even in her lifetime, thousands came “to watch her burn.”

  The society still seeks plants that might have as their ancestors a Hulda Klager variety not yet returned to the garden.

  If one misses Lilac Days, the gardens are still open for walking and viewing. The garden hosts Washington State’s oldest ginkgo tree, five varieties of magnolia trees, and countless annuals and perennials. Guests are welcome to sit on benches and just breathe in beauty. The fragrance lingers long after Mother’s Day, and the beauty of blooms of all kinds of flowers offer both a story worth remembering and a place of rest for the world where lilacs still bloom.