The garden was three-quarters of an acre and it was gone by October. Not gradually — the new owners had a landscaper in before the estate was settled. The rhododendrons went first, then the raised beds, then the cold frames. By the time Margaret’s daughter got the call, they were pouring gravel for a parking pad.
“There should be a list,” Catherine said to the lawyer. “She kept lists of everything.”
There were lists. Bloom dates going back thirty-one years in a series of identical spiral notebooks. Soil amendments by bed, by season. Sketches of layouts that were never quite followed. A folder of seed catalog clippings annotated with ballpoint: tried ’08, too leggy or good but needs staking or just yes.
What there wasn’t was any record of who she’d given things to.
She’d given away hundreds of plants. Catherine knew this because people kept telling her. At the funeral, a woman she’d never met squeezed her hand and said, “Your mother gave me my first asparagus crowns in 1997. They’re still producing.” A man from the agricultural extension mentioned a dahlia that Margaret had bred herself — a pale coral with darker edges that she’d never named and never registered. He’d been growing it for nine years.
Catherine started a spreadsheet. Name, date, what they received. She got fourteen entries in the first week, then the calls slowed. She posted on the garden society’s board: If Margaret Landis gave you a plant, please contact me.
Forty-three responses. Some with photographs. The dahlia appeared in six different gardens, none of them the same color — it had been unstable, apparently, drifting through salmon and peach depending on soil pH. A raspberry that fruited twice had made it as far as Thunder Bay. An ornamental grass she’d collected as seed from a highway median in Nova Scotia was now in at least eleven yards.
“And you don’t remember who you gave them to?” Catherine had asked her once, years ago, when a neighbor mentioned a rose.
Margaret had looked at her the way she looked at unnecessary questions. “I gave them to whoever wanted them.”
Catherine had understood this as carelessness. She understood it differently now, standing in a garden that was a gravel pad, holding forty-three emails that mapped a network her mother had built without building it. Each plant carried forward not by intention but by the fact of being alive and being wanted. The dahlia didn’t need Margaret’s name on it to keep opening.
The spreadsheet would never be complete. That was the point Catherine kept almost reaching and then sliding past. It wasn’t that the records were lost. It was that the records were the wrong instrument. Her mother hadn’t distributed plants. She’d let them go. The difference was everything.
The asparagus crowns were still producing. The raspberry had crossed a national border. The highway grass, pulled from gravel, was growing in eleven gardens that would each, in time, divide it again.
Margaret’s memory of the giving was exactly as durable as Margaret.
The plants didn’t need it.