Gratitude Monday: the scent of summer

The house in which I grew up was old by Pasadena standards; I believe my mother checked and it had been connected to the sewer system in 1902. (Fun fact: it backed onto one house where Julia Child spent part of her childhood, and was about a block away from another.) I don’t know what the yard looked like when we moved in, but my parents relandscaped both the front and back, probably based on Sunset magazine designs. And one quadrant contained the lemon tree, a bunch of roses and some gardenia bushes.

I’ve never been overly wild about growing roses—they seem way fiddly to me—but I do miss the gardenias. On summer nights, the scent used to waft through my bedroom window, so I always associate it with library reading clubs, juicy apricots and biking around the neighborhood.

A couple of years I bought a gardenia shrublet. It lives in a pot, which comes indoors for the winter (along with my pathetic dwarf Meyer lemon, which has yet to produce one single fruit larger than a walnut in three years). A couple of weeks ago I was so chuffed to see a flower beginning to emerge.

And another.

Then a couple more—one after the rain and one with a visitor

When I counted six, I brought it inside, because you can’t smell gardenias through double-paned patio doors.

I have to say, it looks like it’s topped out at nine flowers, which isn’t very much of a school try. Maybe it’s the lack of full sun—that patch in my parents’ garden got the whole SoCal blast of summer solar power. But this is enough that every once in a while, I get a whiff of the scent, and it reminds me of home.

And that’s my gratitude for today.