Category Archives: Flowers

We need some saturated color more than ever these days, as we exit this dull winter and do our best to deal with a world that seems to have gone completely mad. Personally, I prefer my drama to be in the form of plants like these, the excitement of a vibrant blossom or a transfixing architectural detail of a bromeliad. When seeking a happy place, I first look to nature. ‘As it was in the beginning’ is often the best space to make a home-base.

A lot of us may be going a little stir-crazy, whether from being house-bound or the typical end-of-winter doldrums. I’m more in the latter camp than the former, as I don’t mind hanging around the home, but I’m antsy to get outside and watch the world turn green again. 

This is when it helps to have a local greenhouse such as Faddegon’s nearby to bring some of the spring and summer indoors throughout the entire year. Stopping by to browse their wares has become my Saturday morning ritual during these winter months, and it’s been a lifesaver. 

I’ve noticed a reinvigorated burst in the growth of our houseplants lately too, which means that spring is indeed on the way. The brown turkey fig tree that’s been overwintering in our unheated garage is bursting with new leaves, just waiting for the days to get a bit warmer. 

Help is on the way, dahlings.

One of my Mom’s friends – the woman who taught me how to force paper white narcissus – had a small collection of African violets that she grew on her kitchen windsill, where they enjoyed the humidity from the nearby kitchen sink. I’ve never gotten into these beautiful little plants, despite the success that some have rightly proclaimed over the years (I’ve seen FaceBook evidence of their recurring blooms). They have sensitive leaves and stems that do not like touching the rim of a clay pot, or the feel of cold water, which will leave spots on their furry leaves. (As a general rule, most fuzzy leaves don’t enjoy water on them. Think cats.) 

While I don’t have time for that kind of temperamental care, I do enjoy seeing these at greenhouses and other homes. They offer cheery bursts of color, set off by darkly gorgeous, velvet-like foliage, giving off a very welcome tropical vibe at this icy time of the year. 

Roses signify many things:

Romance.

Love.

Forgiveness. 

Celebration. 

And sometimes they don’t signify anything more than brightening up a week in winter. The world needs more roses at these times. Beauty will always make things better. 

This bouquet is comprised of some dark pink spray roses and a few traditional long-stemmed pink roses. As we get closer to Valentine’s Day, their cost will become ridiculously prohibitive. For now, they brighten our home, nestled lovingly in a favorite vase, gradually opening and becoming the blooms they have aspired to be. 

Oh magnificent amaryllis! How you stun with your saturated redness, how you thrill with your scarlet bloom! From such a plain bulb of brown, how gloriously you burst forth with your floral explosion, followed by straps of vivid green leaves. You are life and beauty and power in a world sick with mundane mediocrity. You give me hope. You give me pleasure. You give me prettiness in the midst of a bleak day. What price on such a piece? What bounty on such a head?

It is enough simply to exist when you are so richly red.

This post is enough to supply the day with the magic it wants. 

Once upon such posts populated this blog, providing a brief haven for those who deigned to visit, a quick little respite while a cup of coffee or tea was had before the workday began in earnest. A return to the simple and the true. A return to beauty. 

Every winter comes with its own set of hardships and difficulties. Following the Christmas bonhomie there is often a let-down and a few weeks of despondent regret, when recent excesses are suddenly regrettable with the arrival of credit car statements and such. The weather of late has been a bit of a roller coaster, with temperatures that have swung from the 60’s to the 20’s in a few quick days. Not ideal for the seasonally affected among us, but we must trudge on. One of the ways I make it through the winter wilderness is by making weekly pilgrimages to Faddegon’s Nursery. When the nearest botanical garden is hundreds of miles away, it’s what you have to do. 

Luckily, plants are plants, flowers are flowers, and beauty may be found in a local greenhouse. I still remember a little gift shop in Chicago, during a rather cold and trying winter, and one of its rooms was a tiny corner made mostly of windows, where the light, gray and dim as it was, filled the space. A few pots of paper white narcissus bloomed and scattered their divisive perfume in the air, while pretty scenes made up of up cycled metal and wood, along with a few other touches of green foliage, made for an impressive respite. I was having a difficult day, but this brief brush with beauty calmed the turbulence of my heart, and I clung to whatever balm I could find. 

That same sense of peace, however fleeting or momentary, is what I try to capture during the winter. It eases the soul when the outside wind bangs and rages. Our houses can only barricade us from so much, eventually some of the winter will seep in. Beauty, however, is impenetrable. Its essence goes right to the soul and cannot be felled or destroyed, no matter how strong the gusts of wind or how high the fall of snow. 

I felt such power the last time I was at Faddegon’s. It started in the face of a Lenten rose, careened off the curves of a pink spath, and winked at me from the gorgeous painted plate of this orchid. In the tranquil stillness of a greenhouse, where the only sounds came from the distant hum of a fan and the dripping of a recent spray of water, there was peace to be found in the winter. Peace and beauty, and for one moment all was right with the world. 

She’s a real Thanksgiving cactus this year, opening her hot pink blooms for the holiday of gratitude, just as the world turns gray and brown. She’s put on a show before – quite a few in fact, when you consider that I’ve had her since about 2002. A gift from a co-worker, she was a tiny little thing that I shoved in the guest/storage room and basically forgot about over the years. That may have done her more good than harm, as overwatering these plants is their number one cause of death and distress. 

Over the years, I potted her up, trimmed her down, and did my best to coddle her once I saw her resilience and perennial beauty at this time of the year. It’s as if she sensed the most dismal and dark time of the year and decided to gift us a balm of beauty and bright color. There have been some rough patches along there way – recently, after upgrading her into a larger clay pot, she showed a flush of new growth, then suddenly lost one of her main stalks, reducing her structure by a good third, without reason or explanation. Since then, she’s slowly rebuilt herself, and this year’s crop of blooms is a fine one. A pleasant reminder that life is not about perfection, but the growth it takes to attempt it. 

The world doesn’t give the asters their proper and deserved due. Maybe, like me, too many people have written off flowers by this point in the seasonal year. I’m guilty of that, guilty of ending things too quickly when we might draw out their beauty a little while longer. It’s like the last day of a vacation – I want to get going and get home as early a possible so I can reacclimatize myself to the mundane before the cold, dark dunk of a work week begins again. There’s something to be said for that. It eases the shock of a Monday for me. But perhaps there’s something to extending pleasure and beauty for as long as possible. 

Maybe that’s the lesson of these pretty little faces. Give it up for the asters. Give it up for the fall. Give it up for the people who want to make the good times last. 

(And let me give up on the goddamn beer commercial I just wrote here.)

September roses mean more. To begin with, they are so much rarer than roses in June, which overflow from every corner and every garden. In September, a rose is often a singular thing, popping up unexpectedly in some late-season second-showing, usually smaller but somehow richer of color than its high summer brethren. September roses remind me of the delicate preciousness of life, something we might forget in the riotous sunny tumult of summer, when the rambunctious growth of a garden goes on untethered and unchecked. By this time of the year, I want to cut it all back, to start again in the way only a spell of winter can provide.

OH, IT’S A LONG, LONG WHILE FROM MAY TO DECEMBER
AND THE DAYS GROW SHORT WHEN YOU REACH SEPTEMBER
THE AUTUMN WEATHER TURNS THE LEAVES TO FLAME
AND I HAVEN’T GOT TIME FOR THE WAITING GAME

Perhaps you’re thinking it’s much too soon to use the threat of winter. And perhaps you’re right. There’s so much fall first. Beautiful, fleeting, heartbreaking fall, captured in a song with a tinge of sadness, a tinge of September. The blush of a rose is less bashful now. We’ve already taken our clothes off.

OH, THE DAYS DWINDLE DOWN TO A PRECIOUS FEW
SEPTEMBER, NOVEMBER
AND THESE FEW PRECIOUS DAYS I’LL SPEND WITH YOU
THESE PRECIOUS DAYS I’LL SPEND WITH YOU.

The garden moves in cycles – drifts and bounty one week, droughts and drawbacks the next – and it ebbs and flows like so much of life. If you’ve come to gardening seeking perfect satisfaction, precise schedules, and predictable outcomes, you are probably in the wrong hobby. That said, there are incredibly consistent things, even when growing seasons start in cold and wet fashion, as this spring did. Nature caught up to herself and things are generally on their usual track.

At around this time, there is usually the first of what will be several lulls in flowering sessions. We had a nice long extended first flush of floral fireworks, aided and abetted by the cool and moist weather. That soon subsided for a stretch of hot and dry days, and it’s that which brings about a floral lull. The trick to getting through it and maintaining color throughout the season (if such is your wish) is to supplement a garden with annuals or long-blooming perennials. Rudbeckia and echinacea work wonderfully for this. Our cup plants have a pretty lengthy showing as well. Hydrangeas, particularly the ones that bloom on new wood as well as old, also throw off flowers pretty regularly. These are the backbone champions that see the garden through the tough high-heat/high-sun times.

Personally, I’m grateful and appreciate these little lulls. They are a pause in the boisterous riot of color the summer season produces, a chance to ease the eyes with the sumptuousness of green before it begins to yellow and brown off. That’s why I rarely bother with annuals. I don’t need the constant cacophony of blooms to reveal the beauty of the garden. It’s there in its structure, in its leafy canopies, in the long-forming buds of the sedum or the fountain-like grace of the grasses. A summer lull is a pleasant reminder that it is, still, summer.

Goody goody gumdrops.

Tikki tikki tembo…

Sometimes summer is just one long and crazy rhyming scheme, a waking dream, or a popsicle of cream. A time to be silly, and willy-nilly, and pic-a-dilly. There’s no need to be serious when the times are so delirious. Go to the ends of the earth to find a Friendly’s with a Fribbler. Don’t be such a quibbler! Oh dear, my mind is fried. No fear, my hands aren’t tied. My rear, time will bide.

Soon the summer vines will take a stranglehold, becoming too much to do anything aboutuntil next year. These little sundrops are a reminder that it’s still the time to be frivolous and silly. We can return to our profound posture come fall, and it’s coming sooner than we want or realize. Enough of that pish-posh. We came here to play.

Summer is the time for sun and fun, where the only thing to be done is plotting out the trajectory of a walk or bike-ride. Where the meals are heavy on fresh vegetables and fruit, seasoned with whatever the garden is pushing up, where the glasses of water are tall and sweating, where everything slows down and sighs of contentment are plentiful. We have arrived. Enjoy the moment.

If you look closely enough, and are as obsessed with color as I am, you may notice that each photo here makes it look like a slightly different shade of pink. Part of me abhors such inconsistency, and part of me lives for it. The part that loves it is winning out because I’m filling the space in between the picture with words.

It’s like the tricks you can play with your belt and shoes. The break of your legs is just enough to make shades that aren’t quite the same when viewed next to each other work perfectly together when far enough apart. There’s a metaphor for life somewhere in this. Find it, because I’m in no mood to explain.

As for these little petunias, they share one of my favorite color combinations: outer petals of hot pink and deep throats of chartreuse. They are so bright and cheery I defy you not to be made a little happier by seeing them. (If you’re successful, I don’t want to hear about it. The person that finds a way to shit on the happiness of others is the person who has no place in my life.)

Whoa, that went a little too deep a little too quickly. [Shrugs.]

The simple but potent beauty of a flower.

The way some openly smile, the way some blush,

the way some take their time, the way some rush.

A flower is reason enough for a party.

A flower is reason enough for a thrill.

We bloom and we bloom,

and we stave off the doom.

At the end of it all

If we’re lucky we zoom

to the high crest of the thing, to the ridge of the petals,

to the beard of an iris or the prick of a nettle.

Another story is about to be told

and the language of flowers is sometimes secret.

In whispered dew drops

Invisible perfume

In lace-caps and umbrels

Leaves pointed and smooth

An army of thorns

Bitter sting of a vine

Sweet fragrance entwined

The garden untamed,

the garden unclaimed

leave nothing unnamed

leave nothing unblamed

Marry antique roses

To wise, merry lavender

Floral mingling

Pungent tingling

The kind of mid-afternoon

Mid-summer

Ripe for a Flower Party…

Strange as it may seem, a little sadness and heartsickness have always been the mark of a good weekend or vacation. That is to say, if at the end I feel a little empty and down after a particular weekend, it’s a sign that a very good time was had, and I file it away in my room of happy memories. Last weekend we had one of those times, and we didn’t even need to leave Albany for it to happen.

Andy’s second cousin Tyler, and Tyler’s boyfriend Kevin, were visiting the East Coast from Arizona, so we offered to host them on their way to various parts of New York. Apparently/reportedly/supposedly I met Tyler at one of our first parties at our current house, a rare gathering of Andy’s family and extended family. It was years ago, and mostly I just remember making a bunch of apple martinis for his Dad. (The use of an apple martini should be a faux-carbon-dating technique to indicate just how long ago this was.) Tyler was just a kid, and likely didn’t register on my radar because, well, kids. I had a blast with his parents and they remain some of my favorite people. In the ensuing years, Tyler crept into that circle of favorite relatives as we’d see him at the occasional birthday or wedding or funeral – the extremes of life, along with all the heightened emotions and mental mayhem that go along with such gatherings. He and his parents were always a bright spot for me. As he grow into a young adult, it was easier to talk to him, and his intelligence and wit were keen indicators of where he was headed.

We had last seen him on a visit to New York, just as he was about to depart for Arizona. After a double-dose of Harry Potter plays, we slid into the last hour or so of service at the Chatwal, where Tyler and a couple of his friends regaled us with tales of youthful exuberance, and Andy and I moved into the older generation of gay couples without further ado. There’s something very special about when a family member becomes a friend. It doesn’t always happen that way.

When we heard they were going to be in the area Andy made sure to insist they spend a few days with us. There’s no better way to step into the summer season than to do so with a few guests.

The house was filled with Chinese dogwood branches (a nifty way of making maximum use of the remnants of judicious pruning) and a couple of bouquets of roses. It’s all too brief a season, so we must make the most of the time when it’s in residence. The same goes for guests, and Tyler and Kevin proved to be the spark that spun spring into summer.

We began with a sunny day by the pool, and I whipped up some Senor Sandwiches from this crazy-good recipe by Pati Jinich. A supply of grapefruit cocktails was on the ready, and the sun moved across the sky. Having taken the red-eye, both Tyler and Kevin needed a nap. Andy did too since he had been up all night making sure we got Madonna tickets (more on that happy tale later). Everyone slept until it was time for dinner, when we switched to the first rose of the season and a casual Filipino feast.

Suzie and family joined us for dinner and swimming, and then we stayed up into the night, talking and making brunch plans…

When I think of June, I often think of Lee Bailey, the gardener/chef/designer/lifestyle guru who was Martha Stewart before she became Martha Stewart, and who passed away several years ago. His books, such as ‘Country Weekends’ and ‘Country Flowers’, remain among the most inspiring in my collection. I’ve been perusing his Southern cooking recipes in preparation for an upcoming weekend in Connecticut. (Hey, it’s south of us, so Southern cooking will work. Anything warmer than Zone 5 will be a welcome blast of heat at this point.)

Mr. Bailey once described June as the time of the year when the roses were practically tumbling off their trellises, so prolific and abundant was their blooming power during this month. June is certainly one of the happiest months, containing within it the last day of school and the first day of summer and the promise of a sunny stretch of warmth (even if may not arrive until July).

June is all hope and freshness and beginnings, and it shows in the blush of the roses.

At the height of daylight, an azalea stands brightly in the splendor of it all.

The vibrant pink is set off in striking fashion by the new chartreuse foliage of the season.

Spring should not be subtle.

It should scream and shout and announce its arrival and presence with all the brazen brilliance it can muster. It goes by too quickly to be quiet about it.

I’ve noticed that the azaleas have made a glorious showing this year. I don’t grow any at my home, but it’s nice to see when somebody else does. Personal preference only – when done correctly they make a handsome presence, especially at this time of the year.

So let us have spring, vibrant and electric and alive! Let it sing to us at full volume, let it shock us with its brassy, brazen boldness! It is but the prelude to summer…