Bountiful Bouquet of Roadside Weeds

  • Post published:09/12/2014
  • Post comments:6 Comments

A bouquet of roadside weeds. My roadside. Quite lovely, don't you think. Two kinds of aster, blackeyed susans, lots of goldenrod, tansy and a bit of a cheat - red highbush cranberry (Viburnam) berries and some rugosa rose hips. Mother Nature must love us a lot to give us these beauties in such abundance.

Slow Flowers by Debra Prinzing

  • Post published:02/06/2014
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Slow Flowers by Debra Prinzing is the perfect book to be browsing through on this frigid day. The temperature is only 20 degrees, but the sun is brilliant and the ground sparkles with frozen snow crystals. As I turn the pages of the sumptuously illustrated book, my own summer garden exists in my imagination as it never has before.  Debra's 52 weeks of bouquets from local flowers from 'garden, meadow and farm' are full of surprises and inspiration…

September Morn

  • Post published:09/18/2011
  • Post comments:3 Comments

The sun is shining and it is almost warm this morning.

April Fool!

  • Post published:04/01/2011
  • Post comments:4 Comments

We left sunny Houston yesterday at noon, and got into sunny Nashville, but by the time we arrived in Hartford at 6:30 the rain was falling. Our son drove us to Greenfield where our car waited for us at his house. Quick! A few groceries! Quick up the hill. The snow is falling. And still falling this morning. My plan was to plant spinach today, but I guess that will not happen. The only flowers in my view…

GWA and Flowers of Glass

  • Post published:02/04/2011
  • Post comments:7 Comments

I left home Tuesday afternoon, racing the storm, because I was planning on having lots of educational fun in Cambridge while I was staying there visiting with my son. I had scheduled a visit on Wednesday to see the Glass Flowers at Harvard's Museum of Natural History and then a meeting with other garden writers on Thursday.  The storm stopped, but so did a lot of traffic in town. The Museum was closed! The Museum was closed but…

Spry’s Fresh Bouquets

  • Post published:01/25/2011
  • Post comments:5 Comments

Constance Spry found beauty in places others had not noticed. The unexpected drama of the plants she used surprised and delighted people. She turned to the vegetable garden and found one of her favorite plants – kale – but used other vegetables and fruits to brilliant effect. Her arrangements would not have the same  startling effect today, because the ideas she propounded, her cry to forget about the rules and have fun, to see beauty in the commonplace…

Constance Spry – Two Degrees of Separation

  • Post published:11/08/2010
  • Post comments:3 Comments

Yesterday, Christopher Petkanas in The New York Times Design Section called Constance Spry a 'Flowering Inferno."  I have written about Constance Spry myself in the past, once after interviewing a neighbor, Charlotte Thwing, who has since passed away, but who in her youth worked for Spry in her Madison Avenue shop just before World War II. Petkanas, in talking about a new biography, The Surprising Life of Constance Spry, bySue Shepard, passed on much juicier gossip than I…

Gloria Arranges . . .

  • Post published:09/17/2010
  • Post comments:4 Comments

Gloria Pacosa can arrange just about anything, dinner parties, events, wedding flowers, pie baking, but when we got together the other day to shoot a TV show for Falls Cable in Shelburne Falls, I wanted her to arrange flowers. She had begun gathering material before I arrived. She had raided the flower garden for these dark scabiosa, the last of the sweet peas and gomphrena, as well as zinnias, sunflowers and        . She said just…

Driven to Spring

  • Post published:03/27/2010
  • Post comments:6 Comments

The Boston Flower Show is back!  There were flowers everywhere, in all kinds of arrangements and gardens. There was also a lot of water - a pond like this one with a stone 'lily pad' that appeared to float on the water. The pond was surrounded by azaleas, conifers and bulbs. I may have to do a whole posting about water in fountains and streams. There were flower arrangements like this simple vase of brilliant tulips for a…

Olympic Bouquets

  • Post published:02/28/2010
  • Post comments:4 Comments

Nancy Bond at Soliloquoy has a wonderful post about the Olympic bouquets that are given to each Olympic winner, gold, silver and bronze medal winners all. It has been difficult to get a good look at the bouquets. They do not seem to be given or received with much ceremony, which is a shame because they are lovely. Nancy tells the full story about constraints and requirements for designing these bouquets which is fascinating. It's made me think…