Gardening is more than just a hobby for a few

Just like they share genes for a particular hair color, eye color or facial feature, working among the beds and plants in their gardens is a familial trait and common bond shared among generations for some area residents.

Brandon Brazel of Cape Girardeau and her nearly 3-year-old daughter Mary-Cameron spend time together in the garden every day watering plants and watching them grow.

Seeing the plants change daily captured Mary-Cameron's attention One early-summer day she peeked out the window and came running back to her mother.

"Mommy, your biscuits are blooming, your biscuits are blooming."

Brandon wasn't quite sure what Mary-Cameron meant. She told the child to show her the plant she was talking about.

Once outdoors, Mary-Cameron headed straight for the hibiscus plant in the back yard.

And while she doesn't yet know the proper names of the plants, Mary-Cameron does have duties in the garden. While her mother tends to the plants, Mary-Cameron builds homes for fairies.

Underneath the leaves of a hosta plant, she built a little home for the fairies, complete with furnishings and food. She made a blanket of leaves and added a flower blossom as a pillow for the bed. Tiny green berries serve as "apples" for the fairies to eat. Pebbles form an outline for the pool, and there's a gazing ball for the garden.

"She looked all over for the carpet," says her mother. The "carpet" turned out to be moss.

Mary-Cameron's work in the garden is both a lesson in horticulture and imagination. Building the fairy house and placing her treasures there builds fine motor skills, Brandon Brazel said.

"And my mother used to build them with me when I was a little girl," she said.

"We liked fairies before they were fashionable," said LaDonna Juden, Brandon's mother. Her own children were always tagging along looking for creek rocks to add to her rock garden or enjoyed being outdoors when she tended her beds.

"We always brought a lot of flowers into the house," she said.

Those flowers weren't arrangements from florists but picked from the garden. And the kids enjoyed watching her "take nothing and turn it into flowers," Juden said.

That knack for turning nothing into something was passed down to her from Juden's mother and grandmother. Both tended vegetable gardens, as did most women of their day. "But my grandmother always had flowers, and they had neat names," Juden said.

Forget-me-nots and Kiss-me-at-the-gate are the names that intrigued Juden and Brazel. Though she was always interested in flowers, it wasn't until Brazel married and moved into her own home that she truly became a gardener in her own right.

Today it's what keeps the family's relationships on common ground, Brazel said.

Even her mother-in-law, Carol Brazel of Scott City, is apt to share gardening tips and plantings, and to teach Mary-Cameron about tending a garden.

Carol's garden is mostly filled with sun-loving plants that border a fence surrounding her property. At the pool's edge and along the patio are plenty of containers filled to the brim with blooms and foliage.

"I'm always moving them," she said. For her, the fun is in creating new settings for her outdoor room. A covered patio and pool house provide her with several areas in which to create contrast. Tall flowers and grasses hide the unruly vegetable garden that her husband planted.

A child's hoe, shovel and watering can sit near the step to the pool house entrance. Those are Mary-Cameron's tools for use when she comes to her grandmother's house, where her duty is watering. At home, her gardening tool is a "magic wand" that she waves over the plants to help them grow.

Carol Brazel calls her style a cottage garden because of its mix-and-match appearance. She might have purple coneflower tucked in with roses in no particular order, but it's her containers that take the focus.

She spends her winters and early spring looking through magazines for ideas and then plans a trip to the nurseries to buy her plants.

"I just get something different every year," she said. "I keep a diary."

She has an affinity for old-fashioned flowers, so her garden has little hints of the past with its blooms and buds.

And bits of her family's past are part of Brandon and Eric's garden in Cape Girardeau. The rocks that line the garden beds came from Eric's great-grandmother's farm near Advance.

Brandon said gardening seemed like a natural thing to pass on to her daughter. "I wouldn't say that I set out to do it," but when she was littler Mary-Cameron came with her outside. And if you take the time to work in the garden, it instills an appreciation in the child for plants, Brandon said.

ljohnston@semissourian.com

335-6611, extension 126