One day in late summer about a year and a half before my mother’s death, I took her for a short walk on the dirt road near her central Vermont home. Afflicted with Parkinson’s disease and increasing dementia, mom shuffled along slowly, using an old ski pole for a cane, wearing her faded denim hat with a gigantic fake sunflower pinned to its folded-back brim. (She always wanted the visiting tourists to know they’d met “a real Vermont character.”)

Suddenly she stopped and sucked in her breath, pointing to a spectacular roadside display of purple asters and goldenrod against a backdrop of tall ferns and towering hemlocks.

“Oh look!” she gasped. “How beautiful! No human hand could have created that landscape. Do you know why those flowers take your breath away, Peggy? It’s because they grow to suit themselves.”

My mother, Gertrude Alice Martin Boyles - an extraordinary human known to all as Trudy - allowed her three children to grow to suit themselves, though she tended us in such a way that she sculpted our deep interiors with her values.

From her, I got my frugality, my belief in self-reliance and the general competence of ordinary people, my work ethic, my politics, my love of words and, especially, my connection to the natural world and to the important work of home food production.

Unintentionally, Trudy also taught me to hold within myself the necessary tension between the awe of things that grow to suit themselves and the human need to tend things, to manipulate our natural environment to meet our needs.

Trudy grew up as one of nine siblings on a dairy farm, which helped explain why ours was the only house in the neighborhood with a huge vegetable garden and fruit plantings that extended around the house to the edge of our lot.

Decades before the word compost entered our common lexicon, we maintained a big fenced-in pile in one corner of the vegetable patch. Every summer, we planted, weeded, harvested and canned hundreds of jars of corn, shelled beans, peas, green beans, tomatoes, berries, applesauce, jams, jellies, relishes and pickles. We stored potatoes, cabbages, winter squash, beets, carrots and onions in the cellar. We foraged for dandelion greens, blackberries and wild blueberries. We raised chickens in the space over the garage we called “the barn.”

As a child conscript in the family food-producing enterprise, I hated the endless weeding, picking, shelling, peeling and canning, but most of it sank in. When I planted my own first garden I had a storehouse of knowledge about when and how to sow and tend and harvest.

I think about Trudy nearly every day, but especially on bright summer days like today, when she would rise before dawn, set bread dough to rise, and roll out two or three pie crusts before heading out to harvest raspberries (or strawberries or apples) and peas (or green beans or tomatoes).

When we’d come down for breakfast, Trudy would have half a dozen loaves of bread and a couple of pies cooling on the kitchen shelf and a dozen jars of jam boiling away in the canning kettle.

For 37 years, I’ve lived in the house and grown food on the land Trudy bought in 1969, when, driving home from visiting her daughters in Cambridge, she passed a house with a For Sale sign on the lawn and a white stallion galloping around on the hillside behind it.

“That magnificent white horse drew me in,” she told me later. “I took him as a sign, a signal that this was the place, a real place that could feed my grandchildren and teach them about the important things in this world.” She went into that house, sat down at the kitchen table with the farmer and his wife, and signed a sales agreement that day, paying for the place with insurance money my dad had left when he died five years before.

Almost every day for more than three decades, I’ve eaten something grown on the land Trudy bought that day. I spend most of my vacation days working in my bony hillside garden. I’ve done much of my most important pondering and grieving and raging and celebrating while tending my peas and cabbages and squashes.

Last year, we cut way back the size of the lawn we mow. This morning, I visited one of the overgrown areas. There among the tall grasses, I saw daisies and violets and buttercups, Indian paintbrushes, baby’s breath, and, sure enough, asters and goldenrods, poking through in bold self-assertion, growing to suit themselves.

By Peg Boyles, Writer/Editor