Columns: In the Garden: Mum’s the Word

But you see, right there I’m giving mums too much credit. There was really only one kind of mum, the kind garden centers sell eight kabillion gallon containers of every fall; it just came in 30 different colors. And not shockingly different, just moderately different, running a narrow gauntlet from white to buff to maroon, with the occasional yellow. I knew exactly what had happened here. The undiscerning husband who’d owned this house before we did had bought his bride, each fall, a gallon pot of mums. And she, the spineless idiot, never told him what she thought of mums, and so she wound up with a yard full of the blasted things. And now all of them were mine.

I should have yanked them out then and there. But there were so many of them, and I had two little kids, and one of them was forever digging up cat feces in the sandbox, so major garden projects tended to get tossed aside. I know. I was spineless, too. I let the chrysanthemums grow.

It was a terrible mistake.

It was a mistake because every year when the mums started coming up, I’d hear my long-deceased mom hissing in my ear: Pinch them back three times by the Fourth of July. (Mom, mum. It had to have been her; who else would care? ) So there I’d be, still with the two little kids, one of whom really was uncanny at locating cat feces, snapping the tops off all those damned chrysanthemum plants, and then trying like hell to remember as the Fourth of July drew nearer: How many times have I already done this? And no matter how often I pinched them back, or didn’t, by late September they were as tall as hollyhocks and sprawling all over the sidewalks and spreading their loathsome mum smell throughout the yard.

I will say this, though: Mums bloom forever. Mine started opening in mid-August and kept going into December, and even January one mild year. If I’d liked mums, I would have been thrilled. Doug thought they were nifty. “What are those things still blooming all over the side yard?” he’d ask each Thanksgiving, in a floral equivalent of the movie Groundhog Day.

“Mums,” I’d say grimly, and he was by now sufficiently espaliered not to say anything more.

I’ve heard that the Japanese adore chrysanthemums. The Japanese emperor, I’m told, sits on the Chrysanthemum Throne, and honors his nation’s heroes with the Supreme Order of the Chrysanthemum. There’s even an annual festival dedicated to the flower. The Japanese are inscrutable to me. But they’re not the only ones. The U.S. National Chrysanthemum Society has a mind-boggling classification system based on the shapes of blooms; these include “brush and thistle,” “intermediate incurve” and “anemone.” The mum flowers in my garden, however, are all shaped exactly the same: like mums.