At the first meeting I had with a potential client in Harlem, she told me that she was just starting to function again since her mother's death. This had thrown her into such a shock and sadness, that even though she had just bought a new townhouse, she hadn't done anything with the backyard. I told her about my mother's struggle with breast cancer and how it had recently taken a turn for the worse. We sat at her table and cried. Then she hired me to install a garden and I undercharged her.

My client is a native New Yorker who grew up in an apartment, so she didn't have much experience with plants. Her mother's favorite color had been yellow, so that became our guiding principal. I planted yellow perennials that included coreopsis, lilies, roses and black-eyed susans. These I mixed with soft lavenders and blues like purple coneflowers, phlox, Russian sage, salvia, and butterfly bushes.

I gave her instructions on how to care for the garden and told her that many people found gardening good for grief. (Though she, like many New Yorkers new to the gardening process, thought that each time a flower stopped blooming, the plant was dead. I had to talk her through this process a few times and hoped it didn't cause her anxiety.)

She now seems to enjoy taking care of her yard. People tend to start gardening the same way they began writing poetry--in response to grief. Divorces, deaths, loneliness, and displacement are frequently the catalyst. People recover, remarry, and heal but they continued to garden out of habit, or to maintain what they invested in.

Over time you come to realize that plants are not just a source of regeneration, life and beauty. There's a lesson about illness and death to be learned in the process. Into the ground we plant seeds and we place bones and both processes are essentially, inherently, mysteries that are constantly unraveling.

Now that it's time to plant bulbs, I figured we'd plant a big mix of daffodils, or narcissus, so that in early, mid and late spring for years to come, she'll have a cheerful, fragrant memorial to her mother. Around these we're going to cluster lots of little grape hyacinth, or muscari to keep our color combination and add a little contrast.