a magic garden

She claims to be no gardener. Yet here, a good three decades since I got to first enjoy it, the garden blooms wondrously still. “I don’t know how you do it,” I told Oma, shaking my head as we looked out the window at twilight’s glow last night. There is a good reason, I think, that she has had people coming as “tourists” to see the springtime sights. After a while of watching strangers peering into her yard, Oma asked once what they were doing, and was told that they had come to see her magic tree. She laughed then, since she had played around a bit with it: when she noticed that the forsythia branches were weaving in among the lilac blooms, Oma decided to try letting it be–to cut the vine just enough for it to blend with the lilacs. Sure enough, the next time the forsythia bloomed, it turned the lilac tree brilliant yellow, as if the tree was a forsythia tree. But then, while some of the yellow blooms lingered, lilac blooming season began, so that this single tree morphed from forsythia to lilac.
Gardener or not, Oma’s garden is good, very good . . .
Dein Garten ist gut, Oma, ist zehr gut!