Splendor int the grass and glory in the Lily

It took a Lily Gamboa O’Boyle to get me interested in gardens and flowers. My siblings and I grew up in a house with an expansive garden but other than playing there as kids and using it as a setting for outdoor parties, I took no interest in getting to know the variety of plants my mother chose to put there. I know we have a mango tree that gave us the sweetest Indian mangoes and our duhat tree hovered over our driveway and littered it during its seasonal harvest. The white and pink kalachuchi were beautiful when it bloomed, the fuchsia bougainvilleas and santans lined some paths in our garden and served as decorations during informal garden parties. Other than those, I can’t name the many beautiful plants that the gardener and Mom put there.

Lily O’Boyle tans outdoors at her Connecticut home with pet Leonides.

When I was living in New York, Lily O’Boyle would invite me to spend the weekends with her and her family in her country house in Lyme, Connecticut. During my first visit, Lily toured me around the rolling span of land that engulfed their property and that’s where I received my first lecture in horticulture and landscape design. I realized how limited my knowledge was of plants and flowers when Lily kept correcting my terms. What I called a pine tree, she called a cypress tree. What I called a big santan, she called a hydrangea; a cabbage rose was an antique rose variety. Her lecture would go on the whole time we were exploring the vast land around us until my brain could not absorb any more data. At the end of every visit, I felt more and more enlightened about gardens and plants and started to take an interest in them. I even toyed with the idea of putting up a flower shop when I got back to Manila — that was how much Lily’s influence rubbed off on me.

A pair of Foo dogs mark the front entrance of the Connecticut house abloom with different varieties of hydrangeas.

One summer, she invited two plant-loving friends and myself to her new home in Florida, not too far away from Orlando. The O’Boyles’ Florida retreat was in one of the oldest gated communities in the USA. Situated on the highest point in Central Western Florida, the community was founded by citrus landowners and designed by the renowned firm of Frederick Law Olmstead, who designed (among others) the famous Central Park and Fishers Island in New York. As much as I wanted to visit Disney World in nearby Orlando, I was outnumbered by my three companions, who preferred to visit the botanical gardens. I felt like a kindergarten child tagging along with three Ph.D. graduates of horticulture. 

In Connecticut, The Old Rose garden planted with antique roses dates back to ancient times.

On our fifth day, they decided to make me happy by giving in to my wish to go to Disney World, but that was after we had made the rounds of all the botanical gardens around the area. Lily took us to the Bok Tower, which was a botanical showcase. We went to the Sanctuary that has a marble tower and attended a lecture on indigenous plants. It is so important to plant native and indigenous plants because of their dwindling water supply.

There was never a dull moment during this trip to Florida. There was always something new to learn every day, which reiterated my realization that life is a constant learning process. During that trip, I got to learn so much about plants and gardens that I started to obsess about having a beautiful garden in the small plot of land at the back of my ground-floor apartment in Manhattan. The obsession was short-lived after a landscaper handed me an estimate of the cost of my dream garden.

Lily’s Florida garden is tamer than her Connecticut garden and is much smaller. She has palm trees, Italian cypress trees, a variety of ferns, orchids and roses.

I still have a lot to learn about gardens and plants from my friend Lily, but I am content with the thought that she will always be there to teach me.