What are your earliest garden memories? (via The Eloquent Garden)

My first garden memory is rather bizarre, dating from 1949, when I was 4 years old.

. My grandmother and I visited her friend, Mr. Seifert, who lived near the East River in Manhattan. The UN was under construction, and they were making beautiful gardens.

My grandmother, Mrs. Seifert and I crept over to the building site late at night, with large sacks and folding carts, typically used in NYC to carry groceries. We filled the sacks with earth meant for the UN gardens and wheeled it all home.

I knew we were stealing- but I couldn’t understand why we were stealing dirt. Wasn’t dirt worthless? Were we still bad? What did it mean?

When I asked, I was told it was OK to steal dirt, and that UN dirt was really good dirt, so it was very OK to steal that, and we weren’t really stealing anyway, we were just taking stuff home; after all, the UN had LOTS of dirt, and we didn’t.

My next memory happened a year later. We were visiting Mrs. Seifert’s garden, which now consisted of waist high beds in the yard behind her brownstone. She raised lots of tomatoes, and I was encouraged to pick off the hornworms that ate them, put the worms in a big bucket, and mash them up with a potato masher.

It was OK to kill them because they were bad bugs, stealing Mrs. Seifert’s tomatoes.

All this was very puzzling. But I loved my grandmother and I liked Mrs. Seifert too, who had a small dog named “Lukshen,” which means noddle.