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.

Poppies in the Garden – At Last!

My love affair with poppies began in 1977, when my Tante Helen introduced me Georgia O’Keeffe’s “Oriental Poppies – 1928.” The colors are so vibrant, yet there’s something restful about the way the flowers lean on each other.

When the movie “Room with a View” came out in 1986, a young couple’s first kiss occurs in a field of barley, “touched with crimson stains of poppies.” It was SO romantic! Then and there I decided that someday, I would have poppies in my garden.

I planted poppies from seed in the garden at my St. Paul house. I watched carefully for signs of germination and kept the area free from pesky weeds. I seemed to have been inundated by thistles, which I pulled, to allow my precious poppies to come up. But, alas, no poppies arrived. Imagine my surprise and embarrassment the following year when I saw a potted poppy at the nursery and immediately recognized my “thistle” from the year before. I hadn’t pulled weeds, I’d pulled up the plants! (Rookie mistake.)


I had a couple other missteps with poppies and thought I’d never have poppies in my garden. Then, toward the end of the growing season last year, I found a few tiny plants on sale for about a dollar each and decided, “what the heck.” I stuck them in the ground, and covered them with marsh hay for the winter. Apparently, that worked. They were among the first plants coming up this spring, and Monday, they started blooming! Beautiful.