My Life in the Little Brown House, part 24: Flower Garden and Lawn

My mother liked flowers and she had various flowerbeds both in the back yard and the front yard. There was a white trellis fence from the southwest corner of the house to the south property line and thence west to about when the vegetable garden began. Many of my mother’s flowers were along this fence, and I believe there was some sort of climbing rose on the trellis over the gate through the fence.

My father assisted in the cars of the yard but as to flower his attention (and liking) was directed to the canna plants and bulbs. The foliage was a darkish purple-brown and the plants grew sort of like short cornstalks, though with wider leaves. The flowers were brilliantly colored and were located like the tassel on a corn plant. The bulbs would not survive the cold Iowa winters outside so my father dug them up every fall and stored them over the winter in the basement.







































Canna lilies

Even then he liked trees and on the south side of the house were two or three trees of a species unusual to Gowrie — right now I can’t recall the name for them. They had as I remember quite large leaves. I think it was he who selected them. Another thing I remember about my father’s care of the yard was the lawnmower he had. Mechanically it was an excellent mower, but it was very hard to push. I think this may have been because the reel was geared to rotate at such a high speed, requiring considerable traction between the wheels and the ground. Perhaps to get this traction the mower was also heavier than other lawnmowers I’ve encountered over the years. It was also the only mower I’ve encountered that had a round handle — again of excellent construction but quite heavy. My father could push it handily enough but it was more than I could handle at that young age. Somewhere about the time of the move to the farm another lawnmower was acquired that was easier to push and this became the instrument of use in subsequent years.

Across the roadway to the eat, in the front of the little brown house were several vacant lots, with trees and buses in them that made them good play areas for us children. Along the roadway on the opposite side my father kept the native grasses mowed, I suppose for appearance sake. One summer during the Depression years a family camped under the trees in the vacant lot. We had, as children, some contact with them, but I suspect we were warned by my mother not to become too closely involved with them.

Further east beyond the vacant lot was the Anton Byers’ home. This was a rather large, well-constructed house that (I am told) was the house that Uncle Carl used sort of as a prototype for Grandmother’s house in town. The two houses are roughly similar in overall dimensions but the Byers house has a more pleasing external appearance. To my recollection I was never inside the house so I don’t know how the interior compares to Grandmother’s. If it is true that Uncle Carl was the person who “decided” what the house in town would be like, it must have meant that he had, implicitly, assumed the status of “head of household” even perhaps during the last years of my grandfather’s life.