Beautiful Bouquets

There’s nothing like a bouquet of fresh flowers to pick up your spirits.

One of the reasons I love the flower gardens here at Auntie K’s is they provide cut flowers throughout the growing season for bouquets. I enjoy taking a bouquet of fresh flowers to a dinner, or friend in the hospital, or to my office. I like having fresh flowers at home, too! People seem to like getting the bouquets as much as I like putting them together. I collect vases and jars at garage sales and save all my glass containers instead of recycling them so I can give the bouquets without having the recipient or me worry about the vase. I also pick up ribbon if it’s on sale to dress up the neck of the jars cum vases.

A few years ago, I received a bouquet that included a hosta leaf, which I thought was both beautiful and creative. Why include only the blossoms from the garden when beautiful greenery abounds as well?! I’ve been including them in bouquets ever since.

This year, the spring bouquets included tulips, trollius, iris, lilac, bleeding heart, anemone, chives, polemonium, and centaurea. Roses, poppies, peonies, lilies, and sprigs of salvia were featured in early summer bouquets. Now, I’m using the coneflowers – white and purple (I lost the golden ones to a mite), rudbeckia, roses, sprigs of Russian sage, and garden phlox. Later in the year, the asters get added to the mix.

The roses are in full bloom again and I think they’ll make a great foundation for a couple of bouquets.

p.s. I had a mishap with my computer earlier in the week and don’t have the ability right now to post photos. Hopefully, I’ll get things figured out in a couple of days and can post photos again.

An Old Fashioned Garden?

One of the things I miss about my St Paul house is the garden. I had worked for years to get it “just so.” And, while I didn’t want to re-create the entire garden at my new home, I did want to include a few favorites. I found a few items without trouble, but two items proved more difficult than I anticipated! And, I really wanted them because I liked the blossoms and fragrance of both. Most times, you get one or the other.

The first item I looked for was a rugosa shrub rose called “Sir Thomas Lipton.” I couldn’t find them in nurseries anywhere. I finally was able to locate a place in southern Minnesota that carried them bare root. When I went to pick them up, the sales person said they didn’t get much call for these roses anymore since they’re so old fashioned.

The second item was a lilac called “Albert Holden.” I drove from nursery to nursery for two seasons in search of the elusive Mr. Holden, and eventually found him at Dundee Nursery in Plymouth. The nurseryman said, “You know, people don’t ask for these old-fashioned lilacs anymore. They want the new varieties.”

I laughed when he said it and told him that it was the second time I’d heard the phrase “old fashioned” about shrubs I was putting in my garden. He said I must just be one of those old fashioned girls.

If it means I have two of my favorites in my gardens now, “old fashioned” is a label I can live with!

Shrubs, cubed

When I bought my home, it had a giant arborvitae at the corner, an overgrown honeysuckle on the west side, and 4 “cubed” shrubs under the front windows. I discovered that the largest of the cubes was actually a bridal veil spirea—a shrub that wants to flow and drape, like, um, maybe a bridal veil and not be constricted into a cube. They were all too close to the house, the front steps and to one another, so I took everything out except for the giant arborvitae and started over. (Oh, and the cubed shrubs were planted in 8 inches of river rock, but that’s a topic for another day.)

Last weekend, on my way home from Little League, I drove by a yard that had a long squared off “hedge.” I noticed some purple blobs and then some white blobs in the hedge, and then, I realized I was looking at lilacs, cubed! I stopped the car and just stared – not fully believing what I was seeing.

Why, oh, why do people cube their flowering shrubs?! Am I alone in my horror of this unnatural treatment of flowering shrubs?

I can see pruning evergreens to help them keep their shape. And, I appreciate a good topiary and have great respect for Bonsai gardeners. But, I’ve never understood making a flowering shrub into a cube—or a ball for that matter.

If anyone has insights into the practice of making cubes of flowering shrubs, please let me know!

Flower Folly

A couple of weeks ago, I was at an impromptu neighborhood barbecue. Most of us are avid gardeners and were excited about the early and warm spring we’d been having. We ate outside and were noticing that the lilacs were just getting ready to pop open.

I told the group about the anxiety I had about the lilacs blooming the year I got married, since we had decided to use bouquets of lilacs as our wedding flowers. All was well that year. The lilacs came in about three days before our big day and the morning of our wedding, I cut 24 vases of lilacs. One of the women roared with laughter at the folly of depending on the blooming of a flower for such a major event! I had never thought about my dream of being married among the lilacs as folly, but her words were true. Depending on the year, the lilacs may not have been in bloom – even though I had selected a date toward the end of the possible bloom “schedule.”

And, I had been fooled by Mother Nature on other occasions. When I was married, my ex and I held a “Tulip Dinner” on our deck each spring—typically in early May. Several years, it was a lovely dinner and the tulips were in their glory. Other years, it was warm enough to eat outside, but I had to stick plastic tulips in the ground, because the real things were not quite ready yet. And, one year, we had to eat inside because it snowed the night of the Tulip Dinner!

Am I the only one who has “counted on” a flower or shrub to bloom for a special occasion? What are your “Flower Follies”?