I flew to Pittsburgh on the first Wednesday of March 2026. My mother picked me up at the airport in a Subaru she has owned since 2015, with a back seat full of mulch bags and a cooler of grocery-store tulips. She had not told me, on the phone, that the tulips were for the garden. She told me, on the phone, that the garden was "fine." The garden was not fine.
Below is the story, in the order it actually happened. I have changed my mind about several things I used to believe about gardens and aging parents. There is a brief history of how the American backyard garden went from a 1943 Victory Garden to a 2026 contractor's invoice. And there is, at the end, an honest summary.
What the garden looked like when I arrived
The house is a 1920s brick colonial in Point Breeze. My parents bought it in 1989 for $185,000. My mother has gardened it, in some form, since the spring of 1990.
When I walked out the back door the morning after I arrived, the garden was a mess. The daffodils were coming up. The peonies had not been cut back in November. The tomato cages from last summer were still standing in the back bed, rusted at the joints, the Florida Weave of jute twine still wrapped around them. The rose — my father's anniversary rose, planted in 1998 — had produced exactly one bloom, on the north side of the bush, where nobody could see it.
My mother came out behind me in a fleece and slippers. She had a Dramm watering wand in one hand ($24, the lime-green one from Lowe's) and Fiskars pruners ($30, the bypass kind) in the other. She was going to garden. She was not going to admit she could not.
"The peonies need cutting back," she said. "I'll get to it this weekend."
I said, "Let me help."
She said, "There's nothing to help with."
There was, in fact, everything to help with.
What the garden actually contains
Here is what is, as of March 2026, growing in my mother's backyard. This is what thirty-five years of attention looks like.
1. The peonies, three plants, $20 each (1991). Transplanted from my grandmother's garden in Squirrel Hill, two blocks from the house my mother grew up in. My grandmother died in 1994. The peonies have bloomed every year except 1996, when the late frost killed the buds. They are the most important plants in the garden.
2. The anniversary rose, one plant, $35 (1998). A David Austin 'Graham Thomas' that my father bought my mother for their 30th anniversary, from a nursery in Shadyside that has, since 2017, been a yoga studio. My father died in 2018. The rose has never quite recovered.
3. The tomato, one plant, $4 seedling (annually since 1991). A 'Brandywine' that my mother has grown every year since 1991, from a seedling she buys at a nursery somewhere in Allegheny County. The variety has not changed in thirty-four years. The seedling source has changed three times. This year: "the place on Forbes, but they closed, so I went to the one in Regent Square."
4. The hydrangeas, four plants, $30 each (2005). Endless Summer. The blue ones. They also, every winter, die back to the ground. They come back in June. My mother, every March, assumes they have died for good. They have never died for good.
5. The hostas, eight plants, $15 each (2003). Planted along the north side of the house. "The only plants the deer don't eat," in my mother's accounting. Also the only plants that have, in twenty-two years, never required a single minute of attention.
6. The daffodil bulbs, $40 for fifty (1996), $50 for seventy-five (2018). Planted in two waves — a hundred and twenty-five bulbs total, in the front bed, under the maple. The daffodils come up every March, before anything else.
7. The tools she still uses, $98 new. The Dramm watering wand ($24), the Fiskars pruners ($30), Atlas Nitrile gardening gloves ($12, replaced every other spring), a foam kneeling pad from Gardener's Supply ($20), a bag of Espoma Tomato-tone ($18 for 8 lb), and four tomato cages at $4 each, set every April in the same footprint since 1993.
Total spend, by my mother's rough accounting, over thirty-five years: somewhere between $3,000 and $5,000. The garden is, by every measurement, the most valuable thing she owns.
What I have changed my mind about
A few beliefs I held in 2015, that the last ten years have killed.
I used to think gardening was about plants. It is about the body. The garden my mother built in 1990 was built by a 38-year-old with strong knees and good eyes. The garden she is trying to maintain in 2026 is being maintained by a 73-year-old with one knee replaced, one hip on the waiting list, and macular degeneration.
I used to think "she'll keep gardening until she can't" was a compliment. It is not. My mother has fallen in the garden twice in the last five years. The first time she broke a finger. The second time she lay on the grass for an hour. She did not tell me until I asked, last August, why the back bed was empty.
I used to think I could help by visiting more often. Visiting does not fix the weeding. The garden is a daily practice. The daily practice is the part my mother can no longer do.
I used to think the garden was hers, full stop. It is not. The peonies are my grandmother's. The rose is my father's. The garden is a layered record of every person who ever cared about my mother, and watching it go is watching her go.
I used to think I had to do this alone. I do not. My partner came with me on the second trip. My sister flew in from Chicago for a weekend in April. We divided the garden into thirds and weeded for four hours. My mother sat on the back step and supervised.
What to skip when a parent's garden is ending
If I were advising a friend whose parent was reaching the end of their gardening life, I would tell them to skip these instincts.
The memorial garden. The instinct to plant something "in memory of." My mother's garden is, in the end, already a memorial garden. The peonies are my grandmother's. The rose is my father's. Planting one more memorial plant is, in the honest math, adding a headstone to a cemetery that already has too many.
The complete replant. The instinct to "do it right this year," to rip everything out, to bring in a landscape designer, to start over. The garden is not the problem. The gardener's body is. Starting over is a way to avoid the actual conversation.
The "she'll be fine" lie. The instinct to tell yourself, every phone call, that everything is fine. My mother has told me the garden is fine seventeen times in the last two years. The garden has not been fine for two years. The lie I told myself — that she would, eventually, hire someone — let the back bed go to creeping Charlie.
The refusal to hire help. The instinct to say, "We can handle this ourselves." The answer is, in the end, money. A neighborhood kid, paid $20 an hour, two Saturdays a month, would do more than I can do flying in from Brooklyn four times a year. We have, since April, hired the kid. His name is Mateo.
The grandchild lesson. The instinct to assume the grandchildren will want to inherit the garden. They may not. My niece is six. My nephew is three. The garden is for the person who planted it.
The "last spring" framing. The instinct to treat this spring as the last spring. It may not be. My mother may garden for three more years. She may garden for one more year. The "last spring" is a story I am telling myself. The garden does not know it is the last spring.
The unspoken grief. The instinct to talk about the garden and not about what the garden means. The garden means my mother is 73, that my father is dead, that her body is failing, that the world she built is being slowly returned to the soil. I had, in March, three phone calls about whether to bring in a landscape designer. I had zero phone calls about how I was feeling. I am, in 2026, having the second kind of call.
A brief history
The American backyard garden is, in the strict sense, a 20th-century invention. Until the First World War, most households grew food in a kitchen garden — a working plot behind the house, planted in rows, maintained by the family.
The Victory Garden campaign of 1943, launched by Eleanor Roosevelt from the White House lawn, was the first national push to convert American backyards into productive land. By 1944, an estimated 20 million Victory Gardens were producing 40 percent of the nation's vegetables.
The suburban lawn culture of the 1950s replaced the kitchen garden with the monoculture lawn. The chemicals required to maintain it were, in the 1950s, considered modern. They are, in 2026, considered a problem.
The native plant movement, which began in earnest with Doug Tallamy's 2009 book Bringing Nature Home, pushed gardening back toward ecological function. The 2015 founding of the Native Plant Society of Pittsburgh, and the rise of nurseries like Gildea Native Plants in Lawrenceville, marked the moment the lawn started losing ground here.
The neighborhood nursery, the backbone of American horticulture since the 1880s, declined sharply in the 2010s. The Shadyside nursery where my father bought the anniversary rose closed in 2017. The Squirrel Hill nursery where my grandmother bought the original peonies closed in 2003. The Forbes Avenue nursery closed in 2024. My mother drove twenty minutes to a nursery in Regent Square because the closer nurseries no longer exist.
The 2026 backyard garden is a small late chapter. It is also, in my mother's accounting, the most important thing she owns.
The honest summary
The garden is not the garden. The garden is my mother, and her mother, and her husband, and the 1991 tomato seedling, and the 1998 anniversary rose, and the seventy-three years of attention that produced something I cannot, from Brooklyn, keep alive.
What I have changed is small. I fly to Pittsburgh more often. I pay Mateo $20 an hour. I have stopped pretending the next visit will be the one where she tells me the garden is "fine."
What I have not changed, and what I most regret, is the volume of actual conversation. The garden is a stand-in. It is a way to talk about the garden without talking about what the garden means.
I will, in October, go back for the last weekend of the season. I will cut back the peonies, pull the tomato cages, wrap the rose in burlap the way my mother has wrapped it every November since 1998. I will, in the honest summary, do the things I should have been doing for ten years.
The garden will end when it ends. The peonies will bloom in May. The tomato seedling is already in the ground.
My mother is still on the back step, with the bent Dramm wand, telling me she is about to come inside. She is, of course, not about to come inside. The knees are shot. The eyes are bad. The peonies are, in ten weeks, going to bloom anyway.