The shoe fits

Rebecca Lindekugel started gardening when her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. She made several trips a year to Las Vegas to be with her mother, and they spent much of the time gardening together. While back in Spokane, Lindekugel and her mother talked over the phone about their gardens.

“When she passed away, I grabbed her garden shoes,” Lindekugel said. “I don’t know why, I just grabbed her shoes and brought them home with me.”

Then Lindekugel saw an article in a magazine about growing succulents in shoes. It inspired her to plant the hens and chicks – shallow rooted succulents – in her mother’s shoes.

“I wanted to find a way to keep gardening together,” Lindekugel said. “I wanted her in my garden with me.”

At first, the shoes were intact and caught the eye of those who walked by. Now, eight years later, they’re more difficult to spot. The shoes have weathered and the hens and chicks have grown and spread, sprouting through eyelets and small holes in the toes. Sometimes she wishes she had another pair of her mother’s shoes.

For now, though, Lindekugel’s planning another shoe garden, a memorial of her sister who died from pancreatic cancer this summer. She’s not sure if her nephew will send up her sister’s firefighting boots or a pair of her favorite tennis shoes. Either way, the shoes will soon find a home in Lindekugel’s garden.

Shoe gardens aren’t a new idea. Through Internet chat rooms, avid gardeners share their ideas about incorporating shoe gardens into landscapes. Lindekugel has found the project to be a comforting way to memorialize relatives, but for many, shoe gardens are simply a novelty.

Vickie Tenney of Priest River, Idaho, started planting shoe gardens about three years ago, after seeing one in a gardening magazine. She created one and took it with her to the Sandpoint Farmers’ Market, where she sells a variety of produce each summer.

“They’re a showstopper,” she said. Marketgoers are drawn to Tenney’s booth, astonished by plants growing in shoes.

Tenney has planted gardens in tennis shoes, work boots, logging boots and even a pair of high heels. Friends have learned to pass along their worn-out shoes to her, she said.

Market customers frequently comment, “Oh, that’s what I can do with old shoes,” she said.

Tenney said there was a run on her shoe gardens about a month ago, and she sold every last pair she had.

Recently she’s been harvesting her produce and hasn’t had time to make more but said she will when things calm down. Besides, she said, “I have to let my hens and chicks recoup.”

Two plants at her home provide the offspring for the shoe gardens she makes. The other decor in her shoe gardens — typically moss and pinecones — she gathers from the forest around her home.

While Lindekugel leaves her mother’s shoes in the garden year-round in Spokane, Tenney said she knows some people who pull them out of the bitter winter cold and give them some protection on a porch or another sheltered area.

“I enjoy it,” Tenney said. “It’s nice on a summer day or a rainy day to sit on the porch and make them.”