My father loved hollyhocks. I don’t think they were favorites of my mother, but she knew that he liked them and allowed them to grow. Hollyhocks aren’t true perennials, but they come back every year because they are very good at self-seeding. If there is an area for hollyhocks in the garden, they will come back year after year.

My mother enjoyed and grew a lot of different kinds of flowers, but she was partial to flowers grown from bulbs in the beds next to our house. She had daffodils, tulips and plenty of iris. I remember walking across the prairies with our parents and looking for places where there were iris growing. The iris usually marked the sites where there had been homesteads. Settlers often located their homesteads near springs or other sources of water and the water in turn nurtured the purple plants, often called blue flags.

My father in law became quite a gardener of roses, especially in his retirement years. The rose garden in their front yard grew in size and in the varieties of roses he cultivated. Roses make both of our children think of their grandfather. There were often bouquets of cut roses in their home as well as plenty of blossoms out front.

We’ve planted a few flowers in each home where we have lived in our married life, except for student apartments where we did not live year round. Generally, we’ve had a few iris as well as some other bulb plants. When we moved to Rapid City, we planted tulips and crocus, but the deer ate the plants before they could bloom. We discovered that the deer were less fond of iris. Mostly they left them alone, but baby deer will try most everything, even plants that are said to be deer resistant. In the case of the iris, we would find flowers that had been bitten off, but spit out when the young deer discovered that they didn’t like the flavor. The plants usually survived to produce more blossoms.

Marigolds were also fairly deer resistant. Most years we picked up some plants from the nursery to plant in the beds around our house.

I love sunflowers, and grew them most years that we lived in Rapid City. I grew them inside the fence of our vegetable garden to keep the deer from eating them. However, I left them for the birds to eat the seeds and they attracted pinion jays in the fall each year. It was as much fun to watch the birds pluck the seeds from the large blossoms as it had been to watch the plants grow.

We have never, however, distinguished ourselves as gardeners. There are plenty of people who are much better at growing all kinds of flowers than we. In fact, there are plenty of flowers whose names I do not know.

The only flowers, aside from flowering trees, in the yard of this house when we bought it is a hydrangea shrub growing next to the driveway. It has beautiful blossoms. I was a bit confused about pruning the shrub last fall, but it is full of blossoms this summer and I’ll be a bit more confident about pruning this fall.

Since we bought this house in October, we didn’t do any fall planting and were fairly reserved in our spring planting this years. We have plans to grow more flowers in the years to come, but our one flower success is a couple of big pots of dahlias. We knew nothing about dahlias before moving to the pacific northwest. Our son has been cultivating dahlias for several years and has several gorgeous beds and each year expands the number of tubers he grows. It is fairly easy to harvest the tubers, clean them, and store them over the winter. A single plant produces multiple tubers, so the next year, there are plenty to plant. Our son gave us a bag full of tubers and we planted them in some new planters I set up on our deck. The plants are producing beautiful blossoms and there are plenty of additional blossoms coming. They have inspired me to think about other places I might plant tubers next year.

Other than scattering a few hollyhock seeds, my father never became a flower gardener. Then again, he never fully retired. Shortly after he began to sell his business, he was diagnosed with cancer and died before he was old enough to draw social security. However, in part because of the example of my father-in-law, I think that growing flowers is something I want to have as part of my retirement.

I’m sure that we will make a trip to the Skagit Valley this fall to pick up tulip and daffodil bulbs to plant around our place. And we’ll likely find some iris to put into the ground while we are at it. I have no designs on making our yard a showplace. I just want to grow some flowers that attract pollinators and give a little beauty to our yard. I’d like to grow enough flowers to occasionally have a bouquet of cut flowers in the house and perhaps make up an arrangement to take to the church. For now, however, I’m pleased and feeling good about the dahlias we have grown.

I’m hoping to have room in our yard for another plant that is new to us. I’d like to grow some foxglove. The plant is biennial, meaning that it won’t produce blossoms the first year. In the second year it blooms and then dies, so to have a patch requires planting some each year. Foxglove is the source of the drug Digitalis, which slows heart rate. It is one of the drugs that was effective in treading Susan’s arrhythmia a few years ago. I have no intentions of producing medicine. I just would like to grow some of the plants as an expression of gratitude for the life-giving properties of plants.

One thing about gardening is that it inspires dreams about the future. Every gardener seems to look forward. “Next year, I’m going to grow . . .” Signs of hope are treasured here.