While shopping at the Greenfield Farmers Market last year I met Danielle Smith at her Wild Rose Flower Farm booth. I found the name of her farm, Wild Rose, irresistible, of course, and she was always surrounded by a bounty of lovely spring bulbs, and later an array of dahlias, zinnias, sunflowers, delphiniums and all manner of other annuals. At the Winter Market I bought a wonderful wreath to hang on our new front door. All this summer…
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 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…
One of the joys of having a garden is being able to give away plants. Last weekend a number of gardeners gave away divisions of their plants to the Bridge of Flowers Plant Sale, helping the Bridge and a lot of other gardeners. That is one way. Another way is to give plants to friends or acquaintances who are starting a garden and might not be able to tell a bean from a bachelor’s button Still another is…
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…
Recently I was able to find a used copy of Constance Spry's book Flower Decoration which includes a few black and white photos of her arrangements. Actually, she did not use the word arrangements, but decorations. If you look really closely at the decoration on the cover of this book you can see that it includes fruits, seed heads, and grasses in an almost invisible vase. I suspect this is not one of her own arrangements by a painting…
Many of us probably don’t fuss very much when we are making a flower arrangement for our dining table. We run out into the garden and cut a little bit of whatever is in bloom and a few leaves, put them in a vase with little fuss and we are done. However if we are make a more important arrangement for a special party, for a friend’s wedding, or the church altar, we will need more flowers and…
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…
“I want to shout out: do what you please, follow your own star; be original if you want to be and don’t if you don’t want to be. Just be natural and gay and light-hearted and pretty and simple and overflowing and general and baroque and bare and austere and stylized and wild and daring and conservative, and learn and learn and learn. Open your minds to every form of beauty.” Constance Spry Those passionate words came from…
A wet snow was falling on Friday morning. It did not last long on the ground, but the day continued wet and chill and not suitable for gardening. I was happy that I had spent most of Thursday cleaning out, weeding and putting some semblance of an edge on the Herb Bed in front of the house. Since we added the Entry Walk to the Piazza and Welcome Platform, the Herb Bed has expanded to approximately 33 feet…