With Mother’s Day coming up, a new poignancy is added to the loss and destruction of my former gardens. The image of the rose-covered arbor that came up in the Facebook memories brings with it a deep association with my mother.

With every visit to my home, her face would light up as she walked through the arbor that led to my patio and back property. Like clockwork, she would break out into a wide smile, her eyes wide with wonder as she surveyed the lushness in front of her and exclaim: “It’s a Mechaya! ( Yiddish for great pleasure or true joy: a sense of vitality )

By the simple act of walking through that perfumed rose and honeysuckle arbor, enveloped by beauty, her stress would melt, her physical pains seemingly disappear, and she would be at peace. Nothing gave me more pleasure than giving this to my mother.

When I lived in a penthouse in the city, I had a large terrace and filled it with dozens and dozens of containers, planters, and window boxes filled with shrubs, roses, and flowering perennials that I tended with great care. My mother delighted in sitting in this urban garden. When I moved to Huntington,  I knew I couldn’t  leave my plants behind, so my mother hired a special truck to transport them to my new home.

On the early September day in 2001, when I moved to Long Island, my parents were at my new house to greet Hersh and me. When the truck unloaded my urban plants, what had seemed like such a large garden on my terrace was suddenly so small in comparison to the land they now rested on.

In time, they dug in their roots just as I would.

Later that afternoon, as we wandered the empty yard, Hersh and I set up the table and chairs that had served us so well on our terrace. Sitting in the barren, dusty dirt, we shared our first meal with food courtesy of my mother.

We all looked around us at the vast bareness. There was no patio, pool, fence, no shrubs, no plants just some overgrown weeds. Everyone saw a vacant lot, but in my mind it was a blank canvas, a place for me to create. I shared my visions with my mother, and as with every other art endeavor I did she was enthusiastic

I hired a landscape architect to work out the hardscaping and landscaping and began this project working with them.

Over the next few months, my mother and I would head upstairs in the house to sit on the terrace outside my bedroom sitting room. It overlooked the expanse of the back property, and we would watch the progress, giving us a birds eye view of the work.

When at last all the noisy bulldozers and backhoes had left, the last of the clay bricks laid out meticulously by hand in a basketweave pattern for the patio and walkways, the weighty curved bluestone installed for each entrance, the Gunite pool dug, the Pennsylvania stone assembled for the retaining walls and raised beds, the caravan of trucks carrying hundreds of shrubs,  bushes, perennials and mature trees had deposited their cargo, the huge rolls of sod were finally laid out like an emerald green carpet to create lush lawns throughout the property, the transformation was complete by the end of spring. It would all be in my hands now.

I would nurture and care for the plants and the land in the ways my mother always took care of me.

The summer after my mother died, I held a memorial celebration of her life at my home on her birthday. I asked each friend and family member who attended to bring a plant that I would plant in her honor. That afternoon, we gathered in a large circle in my back lawn, the 50 or more plants sitting in the center. At the very end of the service, we went around the circle and each person shouted out in their distinctive voice:“It’s a  Mechaya”

The following week, I set about planting all the new flora relying on my skills as a collage artist to find the proper place in my already filled garden. My hope had been that these plants would grow and watch over me, as I watched over them- my mother’s presence always felt.

A living, ever-growing testament to her love.

When I lost the house a few years ago, it broke my heart, leaving this part of the garden, but it felt like her spirit would always be there to keep an eye on my garden and to live on.

Now the Betty Edelstein garden is destroyed, along with everything else I created. In some ways, this cuts the deepest.

Today, along with all the landscape, there is no longer any arbor to walk through. That, too was removed by the new owners.

My land is no longer a Mechaya!