Great thread Tom!
You could take your first post and just substitute Aunt Helen for your grandmother. Down to the bachelor buttons, zinnias and glads in a row in the veggie garden. She grew up in the depression, and she said seeds even were expensive, but all her girlfriends tried to have a row of flowers.
I remember seeing the Schreiner and Cooley catalogue. Aunt Helen would go through them with me, and we would have a wishlist, and she might get one or two each year, not huge numbers like we get nowadays. But she never had a ton of money, and she was depression oriented, I guess. I can't believe how expensive the new intros were back then. I recall seeing irises in those catalogues that were like 20.00 or so. 50.00 now seems so less expensive.
I still have a few of her irises, and I am trying to recreate beds with irises that she 'might' have purchased, in the late 50s and early 60s.
I get really teary thinking about her. A wonderful, wonderful woman, who had no children of her own, but took care of her little niece who had a loving dad that worked way to much, and an uncaring mother. I can still see her meeting me at the bus stop in Rochester, arms wide open.
