Category Archives: Earth Laughs in Flowers

A Summer of Flowers

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At the garden center…

My daughter and I love to garden. I will say right off, though, that her thumb is greener than mine! She and her husband (who also loves gardening) have an amazing garden and yard! I’m always in awe of their vegetables and their abundance of beautiful flowers and shrubs. They inspire me!  After I had the dangerous oak tree removed from the back corner of our yard last fall, I found that I had a new patch of sunshine where there had always been shade. So I created my “Sunshine Garden,” a small patch for vegetables, inspired by Jamie and her husband. In the rest of the yard, I’ve focused on flowers.

Whenever Jamie comes to visit me, we inevitably take a trip to the garden centers nearby. We love the inspiration we get from those trips. But in recent years, much of our gardening inspiration has also come from one particular flower farm owner and author, Erin Benzakein, of Floret Flower Farm. She and her husband, Chris, started Floret Flower Farm over 15 years ago, and they sell flower seeds to devoted followers internationally. Jamie and I love to order seeds from her!

 

Erin has published three books, all of them filled with excellent information and gorgeous photography. Her husband, Chris, is the photographer and over the years has documented their flower journey and their extensive research with what must be millions of photos by now.  They are an impressive team!

 

There is also a two season Emmy-nominated documentary series about them, available on MAX or through Prime VIdeo. It is a beautifully filmed account of their experiences with beginning such a business, their struggles and successes over the years, the people they hired to help them fulfill their dream, and the phenomenal effort of all involved. I found the documentary to be very moving as well as inspirational.

Whether you are a seasoned gardener or a beginner, I urge you to check out the Floret Flower Farm website for inspiration, education (very helpful video classes!), and special sales on their wonderful and unusual flower seeds. I am sure that you, too, will become a major fan and follower of Floret Farms!

Art by Mary Englebreit…

Summertime

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Mt. Hood in the distance…

I was getting to the point of thinking that summer would never come! Record rainfall here in the Pacific Northwest, and what felt like endless gray days, weighed heavily on us although the moisture gave us spectacular spring color. But now…just like that…Summer has arrived with sunshine, blue skies, and much warmer temperatures. I’m actually having to water the garden now!

My reading has slowed down with more time spent working on taming the garden. Our weekly schedule is filled up with doctors’ appointments, but we also enjoy our every-three-weeks visits from our daughter, and an occasional [very short but very much appreciated] outing. But I I look forward to reading on the porch more often now. Summer reading time is here!

Books in progress:

New books that arrived this week:

 

Porch pots in full bloom…

 

Time to Weed

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The sun is shining this morning! After so many days of rain, the yard is like a jungle! The grass, which I was finally able to mow last week during a break in the rain, (quite a challenge!) needs to be mowed again! And the butterfly garden literally looks like a jungle. So… if you need to find me today, I will be outside weeding instead of reading!

Jungle…

Irises

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Last year at Schreiner’s Iris Garden, Salem, Oregon

This is the first year we have had irises in our garden. After visiting Schreiner’s Iris Gardens last year, we chose and ordered some special irises from their online catalogue and planted them in the fall. They have been blooming in the last two weeks, and have been spectacularly beautiful! It’s been so fun to walk outside in the early morning and find another burst of blooms!

 

Of course, having irises blooming in the yard made me think of Vincent Van Gogh and his famous paintings of irises. I have the book, Vincent’s Gardens, by Ralph Skea, on my garden bookshelf so I pulled it down to reread and find information about those paintings. I love Vincent’s artwork, and I love reading about gardens that influenced famous painters, so this was a perfect book to revisit. And I was particularly interested in the story of his most famous painting of irises, which was painted in May of 1889, shortly after he was hospitalized for a psychotic breakdown. According to the author, Mr. Skea:

Vincent suffered four major mental crises in Arles, and became fearful that these psychotic attacks would recur with ever increasing severity. On 8 May 1889 he was admitted as a voluntary patient to the asylum of Saint-Paul-de-Mausole in Saint-Remy-de-Provence, 24 kilometers (15 miles) north-east of Arles. Because of his fragile mental state, he was not allowed to leave the walled grounds of the asylum for the first month of his one-year stay. The often deserted garden, with its pine trees, lilac, roses, irises and overgrown lawns, offered him a calm enclosed place where he could paint and draw directly from nature.

The beauty of our irises brought us much joy this month, so I can easily imagine that the irises at the asylum in Arles would have been a calming beauty for a mentally struggling artist.

Unearthing The Secret Garden

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If you love gardens and are interested in the lives of authors, Marta McDowell writes books for you to love. My sister-in-law recently sent me a lovely gift — a copy of Marta McDowell’s new book, Unearthing the Secret Garden: The Plants and Places that Inspired Frances Hodgson Burnett.

Frances Hodgson Burnett is one of my favorite authors. She wrote The Secret Garden and A Little Princess, two of my all time favorite books. She was also an avid gardener, and created three special gardens over her lifetime — one in England, one in the United States, and one in Bermuda. This book goes into great detail about each of those gardens and about the life of FHB herself.

What an interesting character was FHB! She was not at all what I expected, but I enjoyed getting to know so much about her personality and her life. The book was also filled with wonderful photos and illustrations. Two of the photos that I thought were quite lovely are below. The one on the left shows her sitting in her garden at Maytham Hall. I thought the photo was like a lovely impressionistic painting and had to look closely to see her. The photo on the right is of her writing desk, and I love to see photos of the desks and spaces that writers use to create their wonderful works!

FHB sitting in her garden…
Her writing desk…

Her love of gardens and her writing were deeply intertwined.

It was a lovesome, mystic place, shut in partly by old red brick walls against which fruit trees were trained and partly by a laurel hedge with a wood behind it. It was my habit to sit and write there under an aged writhen tree  gray with lichen and festooned with roses.

~ From My Robin (1912), describing the rose garden at Maytham Hall..

Marta McDowell divided the book into four sections: before The Secret Garden, inside The Secret Garden, after The Secret Garden, and outside The Secret Garden. At the end of Part Three, she wrote:

Frances Hodgson Burnett gardened as she lived — large — and became the unlikely inspiration for generations of gardeners through The Secret Garden. She unlocked a door that beckons. If you ask a gardener if they have a book — in particular a childhood book — that led them into gardening, many of them would name The Secret Garden. Frances would be pleased.

And for those of us who garden and grab ideas for our gardens from everywhere, there is an extensive table in the book that lists the flowers, fruits, and trees FHB planted in each of her gardens. Finally, I have to rave about Marta McDowell, not just because of this table, but because of all the amazing detail she put into this book! She is a wonderful researcher!

Garden Snapshot: Fall Hydrangeas

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I love what happens to my hydrangeas in the Fall! This part of that “long cycle” is so beautiful, and I know that Spring will bring the return of these lovely flowers.

…the flowers ring their changes through a long cycle, a cycle that will be renewed. That is what the gardener often forgets. To the flowers we never have to say good-by forever. We grow older every year, but not the garden; it is reborn every spring.

~ May Sarton, Plant Dreaming Deep

I Cherish…#5: Dad’s Rose Garden

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Today, my Dad would have turned 101 years old! He’s been gone for 27 years now, but I cherish my very special memories of him. They keep him close to me every day. The last time we drove past our old family home (pre-pandemic), his rose garden was flourishing! It warmed my heart to see his beloved roses in bloom, still gracing the old neighborhood with their beauty.

April Reflections, 2021

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My reading in April really dropped off, due to some happy busy-ness. Reading time was given over to Spring garden projects, a visit from our daughter for the first time in most of a year, and the call to be outdoors by the return of very pleasant weather.

I was able to finish two books in April. The first one was Hamnet, by Maggie O’Farrell, (which I loved). The second one was The Consequences of Fear, by Jacqueline Winspear, (a fun addition to her Maisie Dobbs series). I also made a little more progress in my long-term project of reading The Emperor of All Maladies: a Biography of Cancer, by Siddhartha Mukherjee, a book that is both painful and fascinating to read.

I must confess that not spending so much time reading during the day was delightful. It is simply wonderful to be outside in the sunshine after the long gray days of rainy winter/early spring in the Pacific Northwest.