Mom’s favorite color was blue, so a simple point of color in her resting hands.

The Japanese maple leaf cuttings are from my garden where mom spent most of her waking hours before she needed a full time care facility. All of the flowers and greenery here are from the garden, most mom had her hands on in one way or another in her last well years. Mom loved propagating any plant that she came across. No, really! She was compulsive about it!

But the Japanese maple is poignant. I have an older home and many plants that are have been here for decades. My additions are interspersed. This maple, one of these additions, was planted next to an offending (I thought at the time) butterfly bush. Mom was declining, cognitively but not physically, by then. To her this maple was the offending weed. She cut it down, leaving a pinky sized stump where the maple had been. It was one of the only times I cried from frustration with Mom’s illness. I dug up the root ball and relocated it where it came back and was much happier.!

Peonies, Japanese Snow-bell tree (greenery and flowers), plus hydrangeas that were again from Mom’s propagating efforts. The roses are all from one specimen in my garden. It grows from a cutting mom took from a bush growing over the top of my sister’s fence in California.

In my small way, I tried to grace mom with a blanket of flowers, trusting that it would mean something to her if she could see herself in her final rest.

Alice Lorraine Hill

1/15/1935 to 5/31/2023