the garden

Aunt Rose was always eccentric. She pruned the flowers in her gardens with strong hands and was always wearing her brimmed gardening hat whenever I visited.

She liked to enter competitions. Petunias and marigolds, mostly. She said they were easy flowers to grow but looked impressive if you took care of them long enough.

Everyone knew it was her roses that she truly prized, but she never entered those into competitions. I tried helping her with the garden because that was the easiest way to earn her smiles and freshly squeezed lemonade, but she would snap if I tried going near the roses.

“Those aren’t for you,” she would say. “Leave them alone.”

Our town held an annual competition for whoever could grow the tallest flower. The early years had people submitting sunflowers and ending it there, so the rules gradually changed. There are no restrictions on the type of flower, but they supply a family to draw from each year. Asteraceae. Scrophulariaceae. Often daisies because they were, as Aunt Rose colourfully described them, little bastards to grow when you wanted them to become tall.

I helped Aunt Rose cut her flowers each year and submit them to the contest. Aunt Rose was mild mannered, but those competitions were the one time where she showed her steel. We would march towards the stalls like conquers of an ancient battlefield. She never spoke during the competitions, except to tell me to stop holding the flowers so tightly because they would bruise, and then all our hard work would be wasted. No judge votes for ugly flowers. Never damaged ones.

Aunt Rose was often cynical. “If it isn’t perfect, then there is no point,” she said.

I asked her why she continued growing even the straggling flowers in her garden if she felt there was no point. She shrugged.

“Even I make bad decisions.”

She bought me ice cones every year at the competition and said it reminded her of her husband, Albert. I liked raspberry but she always bought lime. Complaining would be rude, so I never did. Sometimes it seemed like she confused me for someone else. Her eyes were sad whenever that happened.

Aunt Rose frequently won the gardening competitions. The town’s gardening magazine ran an issue on her four years running. She pretended to hate the attention but framed the articles above her bed. My mother bought her gilded frames after seeing how much she liked them.

They weren’t sisters. My mother always found Aunt Rose difficult to understand. Aunt Rose was my father’s aunt, which makes her my great-aunt. They see each other only on important occasions.

“I liked Albert,” mother said once I asked her directly. She held her phone close to her chest, a client on the other end. “I just never got along well with Rose.”

Then she flapped her hand, telling me to leave so she could finish talking to her client.

I was always with Aunt Rose whenever mother was working, which was often. My father worked abroad in Germany. Sometimes he sent me parcels of sweets and cookies. I don’t know how much money he earned. It must have been a lot for him to live comfortably overseas. I cannot remember if he and my mother spoke often, or if their gradual silence was what lulled them into divorce. It hardly matters anymore.

Like my father’s job, there were things I never understood about Aunt Rose. I once stayed with her for a week when mother was on a work trip. I awoke in the middle of the night with my throat burning for water. Tiptoeing through the kitchen in the eery stillness of the house, every footstep seeming thunderous to my ears, I noticed a flash of movement through the window. Peering out, I saw Aunt Rose in the garden. Tending to her prized roses.

I didn’t want to disturb her, so I didn’t walk outside. Looking back, I wonder if that was the right decision. She held shearing scissors in her hands, and they trembled as she reached towards the roses. She stopped at the last moment. Aunt Rose dropped the shears and pressed her hands to her face.

“I want to be free of you,” she whispered. The sound carried by the wind.

Then she looked up. I startled and flung myself to the floor on instant. My heart drummed in my chest, and I could hear blood pulsing in my ears. Instinctively, I knew I was not supposed to see her in the garden. I had done something wrong.

Aunt Rose never acknowledged that night in the garden. Come morning, she poured my cereal and asked for my opinion on entering geraniums for the next competition.

I once asked my mother why she felt Aunt Rose and Albert’s relationship was strange. She covered the phone receiver with her hand and shooed me from the room.

“I’m on a call with a client,” she hissed. Upon seeing my expression, she sighed and relented. “They were just… strange.”

The next time I stayed with Aunt Rose, I asked her for photos of Albert. She pursed her lips and I thought she would refuse, but she soon returned with a box of yellowing photographs.

Albert was a tall man. He towered above Aunt Rose, but he had an easy smile. He was always making silly expressions in the photos.

“Don’t ask me again,” Aunt Rose said. There was something wrong with the way she moved her hands. Unsteady. “I’ll share anything you want to know, but don’t ask me about Albert.”

I found it odd that everyone referred to him as Albert. Not Uncle Albert, even though he was married to Aunt Rose for years. Long enough to have met most of the family.

The following year, I helped Aunt Rose cut the best of her flowers. We arranged them in delicate bundles and tied them with twine. Aunt Rose patted my head.

“You’re a good helper,” she mused kindly, in the way that every older relative does when they are faintly amused with youthful antics.

She bought me another raspberry ice cone while we waited for the judges to decide on the winner. She kept tugging down her gloves. I watched her curiously. Aunt Rose only ever wore her gloves in public. Perhaps a hold-out from her own youth.

The judges were all elderly gentlemen. One coughed and straightened his tie before he announced the results. Aunt Rose took my hand, her grip crushingly tight.

She released it when she didn’t win. Her lips pursed. Without speaking, she led me back to the car. Aunt Rose always played music when she drove – classical or jazz pieces with dramatic violin strings. The car was silent that day.

“I should have entered the roses,” she murmured finally. Her voice was resigned. “They would have won.”

Aunt Rose valued her name-sake roses above everything. I turned, stunned that she would suggest entering them. She always yelled at me when I did the same.

She often called them all she had left of Albert. I didn’t understand. My mother frowned when I told her and said that Albert never liked gardening. He would help weed when the weather was too sticky and humid for Aunt Rose to bear, but he preferred spending his days inside. He had no love for roses, or flowers of any kind. Aunt Rose didn’t cultivate roses until after he died.

My mother says Albert had a stroke. Aunt Rose established her garden the day afterwards. Everyone has their own way to process grief, and mother says that must be Aunt Rose’s. Caring for her garden.

I moved to the city for university, leaving my family behind in suburbia. Gradually, Aunt Rose fell ill. My mother would call me with updates on occasion. She was more obsessed with her garden than ever, even with her failing health. Especially the roses. She couldn’t drive herself to her medical appointments, but she still kneeled in the dirt every morning. Pruning and caring for the roses.

When Aunt Rose eventually passed, we discovered a letter tucked beneath her pillow. I never understood Aunt Rose. The letter explained her final wish: that we never dig beneath the rose garden.

It became family lore. Don’t touch the garden. My mother was aging, and I didn’t live close enough to the suburbs to care for the house. We made the difficult decision to sell.

“Aunt Rose would understand,” mother reassured me. We looked through the kitchen windows for the final time.

The new tenants smiled politely and promised to respect our wishes. They tore the roots from the garden as soon as the flowers grew too burdensome.

Years later, when the new tenants were settling into the house, we passed along the wishes of Aunt Rose. The tenants smiled politely then tore the roots from the garden as soon as the flowers grew too burdensome.

The tenants were eco-conscious. They enjoyed the idea of living off the grid. When told that they would have to dig beneath the roses to install a stormwater system, they didn’t hesitate for a moment longer.

I never understood Aunt Rose. No one did. Likewise, no one understood Albert’s death – a stroke of misfortune seemingly overnight, without a body ever shown at the funeral.

Aunt Rose warned us not to dig beneath the garden. She warned us to stay away. Aunt Rose never said anything without good reason.

When those tenants reached into the earth, they found Albert.

Resting beneath the garden. Eyes eternally closed.