Category Archives: Gardens

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…

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.

May and June…where’d they go?

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Daughter and me at our favorite garden center.

Oh my goodness. Yes, we have a lot going on here, but May and June just seemed to get lost in the shuffle of busy-ness. Reading has slowed down, gardening has sped up. In both May and June, all of us now vaccinated, we enjoyed a couple of visits with our daughter. We took a one day road trip to see her home and garden after 15 months of not being able to travel. Then, her visits in May and in June to our place. When she comes for a visit, there’s a lot of garden stuff that happens. We always visit our favorite garden centers, AND she helps in my garden! She weeds my flower beds and makes things look so nice. Her way of “helping,” which is a major understatement!

Two days after she left this last time, I was outside picking our bumper crop of cherries which took three busy days. I hustled to pick as many as I could before THE heat event hit the Pacific Northwest. Then I spent my mornings watering to keep things alive in the intense heat, and afternoons in retreat from the most intense heat I’ve ever experienced. Thinking back over the last two months, it’s no wonder I am feeling very fatigued! But here I am, checking in and letting you know I am still here, and still reading!

Books finished in May and June:

Hopefully, with the hot afternoons of July upon us, I will be getting more reading done while staying cool indoors parked in front of our window air conditioner. And hopefully, we won’t have a repeat of that record-breaking heat wave! I don’t want to repeat those three days of 104, 109, and 112 degrees!

I hope this post finds you enjoying your summer, and that it is filled with sunshine and books…and nice mild temperatures!

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.

 

The Solitary Summer

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“In the Garden”, by Helen Allingham (British, 1848-1926)

The Solitary Summer, by Elizabeth von Arnim is a short and lovely summer read. It is a sequel to her famous book, Elizabeth and Her German Garden, which I read years ago and loved. Click here to read my review. Elizabeth’s idea for her solitary summer is described in the quote below from the book:

May 2nd.

Last night after dinner, when we were in the garden, I said, “I want to be alone for a whole summer, and get to the very dregs of life. I want to be as idle as I can, so that my soul may have time to grow. Nobody shall be invited to stay with me, and if any one calls they will be told that I am out, or away, or sick. I shall spend the months in the garden, and on the plain, and in the forests. I shall watch the things that happen in my garden, and see where I have made mistakes. On wet days I will go into the thickest parts of the forests, where the pine needles are everlastingly dry, and when the sun shines I’ll lie on the heath and see how the broom flares against the clouds. I shall be perpetually happy, because there will be no one to worry me. Out there on the plain there is silence, and where there is silence I have discovered there is peace.”

She did indeed have her solitary summer, even though husband and family were there at home with her. But she spent her days outdoors in the gardens and reading, and she had the freedom she so desired. Her ruminations on the books she read, and the flowers and plants she loves, are life-affirming. Her descriptions are lovely, and I felt as though I was there with her savoring that magical summer. All the way through the book I kept thinking of the saying: “If you have a library and a garden, you have everything you need.”  And she said it even more eloquently in the book:

What a blessing it is to love books. Everybody must love something, and I know of no objects of love that give such substantial and unfailing returns as books and a garden.

 

 

I read this book as one of my 50-books-in-5-years for The Classics Club.

 

 

I also chose this book to read for my personal challenge, “WANDERLUST: Reading the World,” an effort to read books that are from or take place in each of the countries of the world. This book took place in Germany.

 

…painting by Sally Rosenbaum

 

This book is also part of My Garden Reading.

 

 

Gardening At This Age

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…a panorama (thus the distortion) of our veggie garden full of cover crops (red clover).

This garden is really too demanding for me at this stage in my life, but I know I shall never be able to restrict myself there. It has to be accepted that gardening is a madness, a folly that does not go away with age. Quite the contrary.

~ May Sarton, At Seventy

Early February in the Garden, 2020

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…from The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady, by Edith Holden

One of the things I love about living in Oregon is that winters are mild and the “spring” garden really comes to life in January and February! I guess our reward for the very dark and rainy days of November and December are the early bulbs in bloom in early February! Around here, my gardening friends plant their Sweet Peas on President’s Day! That all just fills my heart with gardening joy!

These snapshots from my yard and garden give you an idea of what early February is like in an Oregon town 30 miles west of Portland, up against the Coastal Range, 50 miles from the Pacific Ocean!