My new neighbor didn’t just take a few cuttings from my mother’s memorial garden; she brought shovels and ripped the entire fifty-year-old root systems out of the ground.
She was an influencer, a girl who performed a simple life for thousands of followers.
This woman decided my mother’s legacy would make for some good content.
She stole my roses and then posted a video about it, painting herself as a hero who ‘rescued’ the beautiful, neglected plants from my yard. The comments praised her for saving them from an owner who clearly didn’t care.
Her entire world was built on likes and shares, but I was about to use my mother’s old-world tools of history and public record to burn that world to the ground.
The Heirloom Gardener: A Perfectly Curated Neighbor
The first thing I noticed about Jessica was her lawn. It wasn’t just green; it was a saturated, impossibly uniform shade of emerald, the kind you only see in fertilizer commercials. Her house, a modest rancher like mine, had been painted a trendy slate gray with a canary-yellow door. Everything about her property screamed intention, a carefully curated performance for an unseen audience.
My yard, on the other hand, was a chaotic tribute to my mother’s ghost. Mom had been a gardener of the old school—more interested in life than in lines. Her garden, now my garden, spilled over its stone borders. Phlox tangled with bee balm, and the lavender grew in leggy, anarchic clumps. The crown jewels, however, were her roses. Three massive bushes of ‘Zephirine Drouhin,’ a thornless, bourbon rose from the 1860s, formed a fragrant wall along the property line I now shared with Jessica. Their blooms were a deep, almost sinful cerise pink, and their scent on a June evening was the closest thing I had to a time machine.
My husband, Mark, called them “Sarah’s feral hedge,” and he wasn’t wrong. They were fifty years of my mother’s love and neglect, sprawling and magnificent. I was an English teacher at the local high school, not a botanist. I pruned them when I remembered and fed them when I felt guilty. They thrived anyway, a testament to their hardy, heirloom roots.
Jessica, I learned from the neighborhood grapevine, was a “homestead influencer.” She was maybe twenty-eight, with the easy, sun-kissed confidence of someone who had never had to worry about a 401(k). I’d see her outside, arranging rustic-looking crates of perfect, blemish-free vegetables, her phone propped on a tripod. She wasn’t gardening; she was creating content. And she was starting to look at my mother’s roses with a gleam in her eye I didn’t quite trust.
The Ask
It was a Tuesday afternoon when she finally approached me. I was wrestling a bag of mulch out of my trunk, sweating through my t-shirt. Jessica glided across her pristine lawn, wearing a linen apron over a floral dress. She looked like she’d just stepped out of a high-end catalog for people who pretend to be farmers.
“Hi, Sarah!” she said, her voice a practiced, breathy melody. “I hope I’m not bothering you. I just have to say, your roses are absolutely *divine*. The history in them… I can feel it.”
I wiped a smear of dirt off my forehead. “Thanks. They were my mom’s. Practically indestructible.”
“That’s just it,” she said, her eyes wide with what looked like genuine reverence. “They’re true heirlooms. You just don’t find that kind of genetic resilience anymore. It’s so important to preserve it.” She clasped her hands together, a gesture that was probably meant to look earnest. “I was wondering, and please say no if it’s too much to ask, if I could possibly take a few cuttings? I’m trying to build a little heritage rose sanctuary in my garden, and I would be honored—truly honored—to give a piece of your mother’s legacy a new home.”
The request felt… theatrical. But what was I going to say? No? She was my new neighbor. My daughter, Lily, who was home from college for the summer, always told me I needed to be less cynical. It was just a few branches. The bushes were so overgrown they could certainly spare them.
“Sure, Jessica. I don’t see why not,” I said. “I have a doctor’s appointment tomorrow morning, but the yard will be open. Just take what you need. Be my guest.”
Her smile was blinding. “Oh, thank you! Thank you so much! You have no idea what this means to me. I’ll be so, so careful. I’ll treat them like the treasures they are.”
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