My grandmother’s flowers have excellent project management skills.
Just as an exhausting summer term is coming to an end, the resurrection lilies are getting ready to bloom. Their timing feels particularly celebratory this year. Photographs from Gardening with My Grandmother are headed to two exhibitions:
Burl Gallery, Minnesota
Rejected!
August 22nd- September 26th, 2026
Crooked Tree Art Center, Michigan
Echoes: Revisiting Memory
September 18th- October 31st, 2026
And now another of Grandma’s flowers is arriving right on schedule for its portrait.
After my grandmother passed away, her North Dakota garden disappeared beneath years of weeds. When my grandfather passed and I had a garden of my own, my mother and I returned to dig up what remained. We dug unknown roots and bulbs from the overgrown earth that remembered my grandmother’s garden, drove them eight hours to Minnesota over several trips, planted them, and waited.
During that time, I discovered an album my grandmother had made documenting the garden she loved in sometimes blurry and out-of-focus photographs, lovingly archived in a photo album kept in her nightstand. Those photographs eventually became the beginning of Gardening with My Grandmother, where I pair her photographs with her flowers that continue to bloom today, exploring legacy, memory and our connection through time and place.
But some of those flowers took their time.
For two years after we moved them, the resurrection lilies did nothing. I didn't even know we had brought them home. They have the leaves similar to daffodils, which come up at the same time in the spring, but then they die away and later is when the magic happens. One summer, tall stalks suddenly appeared in August and burst into pink flowers. I had no idea what they were.
They appeared at a particularly low point in my life. I was struggling physically with chronic illness and a particularly debilitating round of burnout, and because I was struggling physically, I was struggling professionally and financially too. And then, seemingly out of nowhere, these flowers from my grandmother's garden appeared.
It felt like a message from her.
What you plant can still bloom, don’t lose hope yet.
Sometimes it just takes longer than you expected.
A year later, I decided to finish the bachelor's degree I had started 20 years earlier. Talk about a resurrection lily moment. Something I had planted decades ago, and thought I had left behind due to undiagnosed disability and lack of finances, wasn't dead after all. Two years of year-round, part-time online courses later, accommodations in order, disability understood, 4.0 GPA on point and I'm now only a year and a half away from finishing my BFA in Digital Photography at Arizona State University.
Every year, I look forward to the resurrection lilies returning and to that reminder from my grandmother: keep going. You don't always know what is still growing beneath the surface.
And this year, their timing feels especially perfect. They were preparing to bloom just as another summer term ends, just as photographs made with Grandma's flowers are heading off to two different exhibitions, and just in time for the resurrection lilies to finally become part of Gardening with My Grandmother themselves.
I have had the perfect photograph from her album waiting to be paired with them.
Apparently Grandma really has been keeping track of my deadlines, so our partnership on Gardening with My Grandmother is still going strong.