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Never Say Thank You for Passalong Plants

Posted by Stacy Reece on

My grandmother was a teller of tall tales and an inventor of facts. She only needed to hear the structural elements of a story to create color, context and a backstory before she repeated to someone else, in more detail, what you had told her offhandedly. She was also a very successful gardener who never bought a plant if she didn’t have to.


My grandmother built her yard from plants that she had gotten from someone else — most of the time with their permission. When my mother married into her family, she already had a love of gardening from her own mother, so my mother and my grandmother were often partners in crime, digging up flowers off the side of some backcountry road where property rights don’t really matter so much. The official Southern term for plants that someone gives you from her yard is “passalong” plants. These plants are given in a spirit of hospitality and kinship with fellow gardeners, and they strengthen the bonds of friendship between them for years to come. I don’t know the official term for snatching plants on someone else’s back 40 without their knowledge. Stolen? Pilfered? Felony on public lands? The statute of limitations has run out on their crimes, so I can share these things with you.

When I was growing up, I thought everybody kept a shovel and plastic pots in the trunk. I don’t know how many hours I have spent sitting in a car waiting for my mother to dig up a plant to carry home. The worst was when she actually knew the plant owners and she talked to them for what seemed like hours. Old, old ladies with names like Edna and Mabel and Inez who had yards teeming with irises and jonquils. They were just overjoyed to share their wealth of bulbs and rhizomes and even a few cuttings from their gardenias and hydrangeas stuck in a Mason jar so they would last until we got home. As I got older, I discovered these old ladies were just fascinating to talk to, but when you are 10 years old and sitting in a car under the hot Georgia sun with nothing more than a book you’ve already read twice for entertainment, these visits were interminable.

 passalong gardenia

The worst of the worst was when my mother, grandmother and one of my aunts were traveling together. I melted into the hot and sticky vinyl seats of our Ford station wagon countless times, sitting and waiting in a little caravan of cars parked halfway into the ditch of some red-dirt road while they looked for plants to appropriate. These women garnered strength from their numbers. Bolstered by the fact that there was more than one adult present, they became courageous enough to venture deeper into the snake- and tick-infested woods to look behind masses of scuppernong vines for even more plants to take home. My grandmother would stand on the side of the ditch smoking a cigarette, waving her arm expansively toward the tree line while she explained how it was perfectly fine for us to be here doing this because this was Elrod McSomething-or-other’s property, and our families had known each other for generations.

It was so hot and so quiet out there. When my aunt wasn’t rooting my mother on to venture deeper into the woods — or my grandmother wasn’t explaining how Mr. Elrod’s great-grandfather was double first cousins with her third cousin’s great-grandmother — the deep and humid silence was broken only by the regular coos of a mourning dove or the faint whirr of a car passing on the paved road. These impromptu forest-filching adventures inevitably occurred en route to the yard of somebody named Miss Hilda who lived in the middle of nowhere and shared a common 19th-century ancestor with my grandmother. Needless to say, these visits took a while.

As I got older and discovered my own love of gardening, I came to appreciate the value of passalong plants and the occasional roadside pilfering. When I look at these plants in my own yard, I remember friendships and adventures. I think on fond memories and remind myself to put a trowel and some black pots in my own car for future plant emergencies.

My grandmother always had a saying that you should never thank a person who gave you plants from her yard or the plants would wither and die. You should just promise to take good care of the plants given to you. Given my grandmother’s fractious relationship with facts, I always thought this was something she invented in her fervid imagination to increase the drama of the conversation. It turns out that was actually a real thing that people used to say.

My grandmother passed away 15 years ago, but she can come alive for me in the blink of an eye or the turn of a spade. I’d give anything to be out on a dirt road with her again, smelling the mineral hardness of wet red clay and her menthol cigarettes, while she stood by the ditch and told me her tall tales and which plants to dig up and put in her trunk.

 

What is your favorite passalong plant? Did you have to sit in the car and wait for your mother to dig up plants? Share your favorite memories in the comments below!

 

Our story was reprinted on Southern Living's Grumpy Gardner's blog! We were just delighted! https://www.southernliving.com/garden/grumpy-gardener/passalong-plants-memories

18 comments


  • Although I like the term “liberating,” which salves my conscience, we call it rustling, which is more adventuresome, after the Texas Rose Rustlers. Saw on FB a plea for identification of an heirloom iris that the writer had tried to get permission to dig but had received no answer from the listed owner of the vacant property. I thought, “Shoot far, wohman, ain’t you never hearda RUSTLIN’?!?!

    Pam Angerhofer on

  • Catherine sent Gayle and me this post. It was very well written. Your aunt still keeps a beady eye on the side of the road…something that’s in the genetics from her mother. There is a patch of gladioli growing on the side of Butler Road that she has been watching. As soon as they “go dormant” she has designs for me to dig them up and place them in the farmhouse yard.
    Hope they survive and flourish.
    As you probably know, your grandmother could get a toothpick to sprout.

    Ladson Golden on

  • When my husband and I lived in east Tennessee, we traveled the back roads on the way to and from my grandparents house in Abingdon, Virginia. He kept an old shovel and spade, that he found at the army surplus store, in the trunk of our car along with garbage bags for foraging the road sides. He dug up “ditch lilies” as he called them or whatever else he could find. It was so much fun just riding along waiting to see what was around the curve in the road.

    Brenda Lawson on

  • I love going on the back country roads here in KY to dig up blue bells I just love them they are so dainty but bright & so pretty if you don’t dig down far enough you don’t get the whole plant —- they spread like crazy along the creeks in late spring to early summer — they are really hard to keep alive if you don’t have them in the spot good soul & water them every day when u first plant them

    Deborah Adkins on

  • Yes, I have tears in my eyes. Such sweet memories! I also remember the eye rolls when I told you we were going to gather plants. ☺️🥰

    Jackie Williams on

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