My brother-in-law’s gardening efforts were exceeded only by his generosity in giving away its bounty: peppers green, red, sweet and HOT. Tomatoes red, yellow and purple and in astonishing quantity given the small strips of garden he grew them in. Square foot gardening in tiny spaces between the house and driveway and along the fence of a small back yard, a vegetable high-rise of bamboo and wooden stakes supporting a veritable backyard grocery store. Saving seeds, over the years he cultured his plants to love his soil enriched with coffee grounds and eggshells from his “other job” as a cook for Catholic Charities. He gave me lots of searingly hot habanero peppers for my work colleague who loved them. And the flowers. The front of the house wrapped in a riot of colorful mums, impatiens and his darling, the stately pale blue-flowered Monk’s Hood backed by a white fence and attended by a carpet of yellow mums so striking that passersby had to ask “what ARE those?” All suddenly gone now but for the perennial Monk’s Hood insisting we recall the splendor Johnny created for so many and how much we lost.