My first memory of gardening and its importance to my mother was from Indiana. We lived on Grissom Air Force base and like all AF bases, the housing was cookie-cutter, the yards were small and planting anything had to fall within regulations. Sterile, conformist, soul-sucking places. I knew it even then, and I was only 4-7 years old when we lived there.

Today I have a love for the scent of tomato leaves because my mother planted cherry tomatoes next to the house. Marigolds, too. Both remind me of her and her act of defiance, countering regulations, because she needed to grow something.

I don’t remember parsley until we moved to Maryland. We moved to Bowie, Maryland. My father followed the path of many poor kids trying to claw their way up and out and bought the crappiest house in the nicest neighborhood he could afford. It included a bullet hole in what would become my bedroom. Bonus! The yard was mostly crabgrass and patches of dirt. A dilapidated car on cinder blocks in the driveway would not have been out of place. I don’t recall if we actually saw one, however. The bullet hole and crabgrass though, those were real.

In addition to decent schools, the neighborhood offered affordable homes built by the famous and infamous developer, William J. Levitt. Bowie-Belair was the last of his post-war cookie-cutter mass manufactured starter-home communities. While Levitt came under fire for reportedly refusing to sell to Black families, Bowie is now majority Black. At the time we moved in, majority white. Vast majority. It was a shock to live among civilians for only the second time in my life, and to live in such a white neighborhood.

For my parents, one of the appealing features of the Bowie house was that it had a yard. A small front yard (if one can call compacted dirt and crabgrass a “yard”) and a back yard big enough for a garden. Fairly soon, a rototiller was rented or borrowed, and two patches were tilled, turned, ameliorated. We ended up with a melon patch on the side and the back 1/3 of the yard became a garden. After a childhood of orange Styrofoam “tomatoes” I learned what a real, home-grown, vine-ripened Beefsteak tomato tasted like. With no benefit of an Internet, or family experience handed down, my father planned and planted a garden. My mother weeded.

Fumiko loves weeding. Weeding is her therapy. Now my sister must monitor Mom’s weeding to protect seedlings from her devotion to weeding. Alzheimer’s has blurred her capacity to distinguish the seedlings started indoors, labeled, watered, and transplanted from actual weeds.

As the oldest of three kids, separated by four years from my sister, and another three from my brother, I became the designated “built-in babysitter.” Years later we would hear the term “parentified child”. My face could appear in the dictionary entry. In this household, it was my job to ensure “the kids” were home, clean, quiet, homework done; to ensure the house was calm, clean, sorted (the ice cube bin was full, and the trays re-filled. If there were no ice for his Scotch, we’d all suffer the consequences.)

So my after-school hours were…busy. And a little fraught. I was on the lookout for the carpool drop-off or car in the driveway. One clear indicator of the night ahead was the time between when Mom would come through the front door and when she would head out to the garden to weed. The worse her day had been, the quicker she was to shoot out there. A leisurely unwinding would mean it was an uneventful day at work. The other was my father’s mood, that’s a story for another day.

Invariably, she would be happier after weeding. Often, she’d reenter the house carrying a handful of parsley.

Back then a little sprig of parsley was considered a fancy garnish, Mom would be tickled to eat it and see if someone was shocked. I love that teensy stripe of naughtiness in her. She also delights if someone wrinkles their nose as she downs raw oysters.

Recently, NIH and others have begun to study the physiological and psychological impacts of gardening. Emerging research shows various positive outcomes including decreased stress, anxiety. Some studies even show decreased rates of dementia, but no causality has yet been found. Gardening even seems to benefit our microbiome by exposure to the soil microbiome.

I don’t need research to show me what I know: gardening is deeply healing, relaxing. It connects us to our people in myriad ways from heritage seeds and planting techniques. It connects us to memories like the joy of a secret planting of non-regulation parsley or the calming effect of weeding. Even a city fire-escape container garden is balm for nerves, or grief. The harvest joy and gratitude.

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Ways to use parsley

- gremolata

- chimichurri

- tabbouleh (we get it backwards and make it a grain salad with parsley, it’s meant to be a parsley salad with some grain)

- if you have too much parsley – freeze it, in oil, water, or butter. It won’t be good for fresh uses but it will be fine for cooking.

- piccata

- potato salad

- pesto

- save stems for making stock

- just nibble for an instant boost and cleaner breath!