Field Notes––

What Nana Taught Me About Bleeding Hearts

By Dottie Evans

 Every May when my fabulous, three-foot-tall Old Fashioned Bleeding Heart (Dicentra spectabilis) comes back to life, I am reminded of a woman who lived more than half a century ago named Gertrude Bancroft Mitchell.

 I never called her by that name nor did I think of her as my father’s mother. To me she was Nana, the grandmother who lived far away from my home in Minnesota, so I did not get to see her very often.

Once a year though, in late spring, my mother and I would board the Burlington out of St Paul and travel by sleeper car headed east through Chicago. Two nights later we chugged into New York’s Grand Central Station and from there it was an hour’s drive out of the city to Syosset, the quiet, rural Long Island town where Nana lived. Her house was long and rambling, painted white and shaded by old trees. There were fields and woods all around and a flock of hens in a coop where I could go to collect fresh eggs every morning.

Nana loved flowers and even as a small child, I realized her garden was something special. Of course, I had no clue then about names or varieties or horticultural habits. I simply knew I couldn’t wait to run down the crunchy, gravel paths through corridors of green leaves (they might have been hostas) into the secret glade where there was a pool and a fish fountain spouting water.

Nana and I were good friends and we enjoyed each other. She appreciated my doodles and laughed when I told moron jokes. I envied her ability to touch her nose with the tip of her tongue. We looked at the Sunday comics together while she read the words aloud. She liked Dagwood and Blondie, and I liked Little Lulu, the Katzenjammer Kids, and Nancy and Sluggo.

She taught me things I never knew about before, such as how to shuffle cards, how to play Canasta, and how to eat a soft-boiled egg out of its shell. At her dinner table, I learned to enjoy eating baked potato skins if I put plenty of butter and salt on them first.

Perhaps you are wondering what all this has to do with the Old Fashioned Bleeding Heart that is blooming right now in my Newtown garden –– except that Nana, too, was old-fashioned in her own  way. She was a large, comfortable woman who wore floppy hats and long shapeless dresses, and she kept a spare hanky and her reading glasses tucked down the crevice of her voluminous bosom where she could easily retrieve them.

We used to walk out into her garden together to look at the flowers. We smelled the fragrant honeysuckle, and we pinched open the jaws of snapdragons and made them bark. One day we stopped at a bleeding heart, and I watched in amazement as she plucked one fat, pink blossom off its long arching stem.

“Now I’m going to show you something magical while I tell you a story,” she promised as she began tearing the flower apart. I can remember the sacred sequence to this day.

Gently pull off the two pink heart-shaped lobes and you have two fat bunny rabbits with their long ears folded back. Next pull off the two white S-shaped pieces and split them into six tiny question marks. Then pull off two delicate fairy slippers. What’s left at the center is one, single, perfect wine bottle with a long slender neck and a yellow cork.

I was so delighted with this discovery that I’m sure I spent countless hours shredding untold numbers of bleeding heart flowers to release their hidden charms. I lined up rows and rows of perfect little rabbits and slender wine bottles for my imaginary games and continued the process when I got home to my parents’ garden.

Unfortunately, I don’t remember the story surrounding those flowery charms. But I can’t look at an Old Fashioned Bleeding Heart today without thinking fondly of Nana.

Over a long, hot summer, my bleeding heart fades and its yellow stalks die down to the ground. Sometimes I forget it was ever there. Distracted, I might fill the empty space with showy petunias or some other colorful annuals. But the following April when the first stem of fragile green reappears, I am 6 years old again in my grandmother’s garden and I remember.