Carrollton Yard – January 2024 (2) — The 21st Century Matriarch

In the mid-1960s my maternal grandfather collected a dead tree – a snag – and cut it to fit from floor to ceiling in his living room. I was probably about 9 feet tall…with branches. One of my aunts decorated it with artificial ivy; other small items were collected and displayed there. When the house was sold after the deaths of my grandparents in the 1980s, my mother got the tree (I am not sure how she got it from Oklahoma to Texas) and it was installed on the covered porch at the front of my parents’ house…with fewer branches and a little shorter. Now that the house is being sold, it is uninstalled and going with a long-time neighbor to grace his family’s garden in New Mexico.

One of the branches that had to be cut off when the tree was installed on the porch has been in the front garden for a long time…decaying very slowly.

Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.

There are rose bushes by the fence that were planted more recently. They were blooming profusely when the first hard freeze occurred…the blooms still colorful and dehydrated - fragile. Roses have been a popular plant with my family. I can remember by paternal grandmother loving the small in-town house they moved to from the farm in Wichita Falls; the previous owner had planted rose bushes – yellow, red, pink, white – that made many a great bouquet for my sisters and I to take to our elementary school teachers. My parents planted hybrid tea roses in the house they build in Wichita Falls; we each had a rose bush. Mine was the Granada. My dad’s was the Mister Lincoln.

Were the big rocks in the front a selling point? I always enjoy them in the front bed, that dramatically reduces the amount of mowing. They have been in place long enough to have lichen.

Of course – the red yucca are always a joy to photograph. This time of year it is all about the seed pods. My mother got a single plant in a pot and then propagated it to fill a significant portion on the sunny side of the front garden. My sister takes young plants that come up among the mature ones and has planted them in other yards…so the children of these plants are already thriving in family gardens elsewhere.