All I could see were daisies, roses, tulips and lilies. I looked around the garden and started to doubt that this was what my mother would have wanted in our garden, my mother had always loved gardening but looking at what was there… I don’t think that this is what she would have had in mind.

The only knowledge I really had was from my mother’s journal and the beauty she had described it,  the drawings of the herbs that she would have just planted or a poem about the lemon tree she so dearly loved.

I was trying to re-create this beauty my mother had described but she hadn’t exactly left step-by-step instructions on how to do that.

I sighed, it just felt as something was missing and I just had to fix it.

The bags I had carried smacked down onto the dirt, I pulled the herbs, the veggie and fruit seeds, tree’s, bushes and (even more) flowers.

The sounds of Dodie’s voice filled the air and filtered through the garden, her songs both lifting the plants and me into high spirits.

The sun was warm on my back but I couldn’t care less, all I wanted to do was power through and get what I wanted to be done.

By the time I had finished, my muscles were sore, I felt sunburnt in many places and sweat was still pouring down me… but yet I couldn’t seem to care all that much.

As I looked around the garden, I knew it wasn’t complete yet and there was still a long way to go. But in my head, I could see the finished product and it was beautiful.

I could see the lemon and orange tree’s growing in my mind, I could see me using the herbs in the kitchen nearly every day and I could see myself sitting here, journaling, just how my mother had done so.

I didn’t know if what I was imagining was what my mother had envisioned when she had written in her journal all those years ago.

I don’t know if my mother had even thought that me, her own daughter, would have decided to turn this garden into my own but I know she would have been proud of me and that to me was what mattered to me the most.

This garden was my way of getting one step closer to understanding and knowing just who my mother was.