An old rose garden sits just off Eighth Avenue in front of a brownstone; its branches getting more thorny and gnarly each day.
And one night, the owner was admiring her work from her stoop.
"We had a house in the country and I wanted to bring some of that beauty to Brooklyn," said Jeanette Tejada, who moved to Third Street in Park Slope in 1994 with her family a few years after relocating from upstate New York.
And in 1995, she planted red roses. And now, after her mother died in 2008, she uses them to remember her mother.
"She would've appreciated the rose garden. I grew up with her planting roses," Tejada said. " I don't get sad, I remember her with a happy face. We are all going to die and I you have to remember those who passed for only good memories. So I look at the roses and remember the crazy things she did, the wonderful things she did.”
And with the rose season in full bloom until August, the red flowers grow each day. But, she can’t take full credit for the garden. And her mother is not the only one she remembers when she admires it.
Her late husband, Supreme Court Judge Charles Tejada who in 2002 threw out the wrongful convictions of the Central Park Five for the rape of a jogger in 1989, also helped her plant it.
“This is his garden, he helped plant it and it’s still here,” she said of her husband who died in 2010. “These roses, that's all I have. Life, you never know what it has in store for you.”
But, even though her husband planted it with her the garden does what it wants. She doesn’t try to control it.
“The garden planted itself. We planted roses in ‘95, a year after we moved here, and it took a life of its own,” Tejada said. “I love a wild, untamed garden. We let the flowers go.”
And with even more deaths in her family, she keeps planting—the pink flowers are for her sister who lived in the Bronx before she passed, tulips are for another relative, and so on.
“We have a lot of deaths in my family: my sister, husband, mother, friend. It's been one of those decades,” she said. “But we all go on and all we can do is remember them while we are still here.”
Through all the sorrow, she still has her garden, which she looks at and ponders over each night.
“It's been a good run here in my Brooklyn garden, and everyday it gets just a little bigger and bigger,” she said. “And hopefully it lasts.”
Get more local news delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for free Patch newsletters and alerts.
