With a few flowers in my garden, half a dozen pictures and some books, I live without envy.
~ Lope de Vega
A good deal later than I would have preferred we have started with our spring gardening. A trip to the nursery is an exciting and unfortunately expensive affair. Just as an arts supply store contains many of the tools of an artists’ trade, a nursery is a place filled with all the tools necessary to make a masterpiece…plants, flowers, containers of all shapes and sizes, borders, trellis, rocks, soil…it is all there and waiting merely for the creativity of the gardener to put it all together. I love the thrill of the first nursery trip of the season!
We began landscaping in earnest last year with a few small projects and this year will see a few more as well as an attempt to establish some lasting perrenials that we can enjoy each year. Today we started with flowers and herbs, the vegetables will begin later this week. We continued our tradition of planting Impatiens in pots on the front steps. We will add Frost Fire Dianthus
and Speedwell (Veronica ‘Waterperry’)
to the front beds. We like to do container gardening on the back deck and this will be our second year of growing herbs in pots there. We planted lemon balm and cilantro today but did not find parsely or lavendar so will have to make a trip to another nursery. The lemon balms smells fantastic! Tori picked out a beautiful orange/red flower for a deck pot, the Fiery Red Gazania.
In addition to these we planted an autumn fern and relocated some of our hosta to a bed we created last year around one of our Bradford Pear trees. Our Iris, planted a few years ago, are blooming and everything is so green and lush. It was a wonderful afternoon to dig in the earth and drink in the scents of spring. There is so much more to do but it was a good start and I’m excited to have flowers growing again.
He who is born with a silver spoon in his mouth is generally considered a fortunate person, but his good fortune is small compared to that of the happy mortal who enters this world with a passion for flowers in his soul.
~ Celia Thaxter
If the smell of fresh air isn’t enough to inspire you to do a little gardening I would suggest the movie Greenfingers.
Greenfingers is a wonderful little movie that was given to me as a Christmas gift a few years ago (thanks Pat!). It is inspired by the true events of a prison program in England that uses gardening as a source of rehabilitation and therapy. The movie stars Clive Owen (Sin City, Closer, King Arthur) as a prisoner with no purpose who begins to see the seeds of a new life with a little help from David Kelly (Waking Ned Devine) and some gardening inspiration from Helen Mirren (Calendar Girls, Raising Helen). Despite beginning his love of flowers with a double violet it is a Primrose (Natasha Little) who captures his heart. All the cast in this movie are wonderful. Clive Owen is quickly becoming a favorite and it was refreshing to see Natasha Little as a female love interest who dresses modestly and wears little make-up and yet looks naturally beautiful. I really highly recommend this film. You can click on this link to watch a poorly done trailer for the movie.
Watch the movie and go do a little gardening.
If seeds in the black earth can turn into such beautiful roses, what might not the heart of man become in its long journey toward the stars?
~ G.K. Chesterton
I think it’s a travesty that people can charge so much for living things, this seems awkward and wrong to me, but I suppose at this point, it really shouldn’t surprise me.
I have never heard of that movie before, I’m not surprised by that at all, it doesn’t sound like it has the makings of a blockbuster hit, but it does sound rental worthy (which are 2 different things entirely). I do like Clive Owen, I’ll have to track it down.
I kill things… Two potted plants have been resisting for a while but I’m expecting the worst.
I agree Jay, its a travesty indeed! If you like movies like Waking Ned Devine, Under the Tuscan Sun, Calendar Girls…I think you’ll like Greenfingers. Its a feel good movie.
I’m sorry Anne, hopefully the kiss of death will pass and you’ll become a green thumb!
Wow, Carl you never cease to amaze. Gardening?! I should have known. You’re a better man than me. I try each year and, like Anne, I tend to kill off my plant friends.
Are you a master chef too?!
i love gazanias.
supposedly they attract butterflies.
mine didn’t, but i had them on a balcony, which may have been higher than most butterflies fly.
I spent a summer several years back working at a nursery. I spent a lot of time in hot green houses, perennial fields, etc. I pinched back hundreds, probably thousands, of mums. I don’t really care for them anymore!
A lot of hard work goes into the flowers before you buy them. There was a group of us that worked up to 60 hours a week watering, fertilizing, cleaning, pinching, planting, loading orders, etc. By the end of the summer I was SUPER tan and, I kid you not, when I flexed I had little muscles pop! Oh, to have THAT body again!!!
I agree, the prices seem high, but someone is trying to make a living. Hopefully they came from a small business owner’s greenhouse.
I don’t do a lot of yard work like I used to, but I was excited to see some lamb’s ear coming up. We used to have a lot of it, but because it was soft and the shape of Lydia’s birdie’s tail, everytime she went outside she’d pick a leaf and hold it to her face and suck her thumb. She picked it clean! It’s finally starting to come back!!
Nope, not a master chef! I can grill stuff fairly well…goes back to those years of cooking in a restaurant in high school and I can make some pasta dishes but that’s about it. I’m sure I could cook okay but just don’t really do it. Given multiple lives I’m sure that I would want to be a chef.
Sounds like hard work Julie but that kind can be really satifsying. I loved working in the melon fields as a teenager….felt like you did something worthwhile at the end of the day and man, the sleep after a hard days’ work was good!
i too did some lawn work this weekend – is lamb’s ear a good thing? For some reason, I thought it was more of a weed…
I adore spring. It is so nice to see everything coming alive!
I don’t know anything about lamb’s ear…it sounds so cute and cuddly that it most likely is some kind of deadly pestilence! 🙂
Incidentally, the weather today is amazing and there’s a breeze blowing lilac and honeysuckle scents all over the place…makes me want to jump from my third floor office window and escape even more than I normally do!
I like lamb’s ear. I don’t think of it as a weed, although, maybe it is. You can buy it for your flower gardens. I don’t know what the technical name is for it. The leaves are greenish/blueish with soft wool like “fur”.
It sounds like one of those ground cover plants that can get out of control and become a weed if you don’t tend to it. I have some honeysuckle vine in the back that is like that…completely wrapped itself around trees, etc and was quite the chore to deal with last year.
You’re just now making your first nursery trip of the season? Clearly the growing season in Kansas City is different than here in (sometimes) sunny California. Frankly, I can’t remember a time in recent memory that I haven’t stopped off at a nursery center over the weekend…it’s part of the ritual. Of course, I could be said that I’m a little obsessed with my landscaping project. This year I started over 50 types of plants from seed, in addition to the stuff in the stores that seduced me into buying! Have you ever noticed that when you don’t have time to work outside the weather is terrific, but when you clear your schedule with the specific intent to really did in the weather is entirely uncooperative? Mother nature can be so unhelpful at times!
Mother nature has been the main culprit in this weekend being our first trip. It either rains on the weekend, gets below freezing, or it only happens to be nice the day that we already have family or work plans that keep us away from the yard.
I’m looking forward to planting tomatoes this week!
I saw the pics of your landscaping from before and its looking pretty awesome. You’ll have to post some more on Mosker once things start growing!
Awwww…you’re sweet! I’ll see what I can do about updating the photos soon. I was in the mood to do some yard work today but noooooooooooo. In California, we’re prepared for earthquakes and floods but I never signed on for tornados! Yet, this is turning out to be the season of tornadoes this year, and today in particular we were all warned to take shelter immediately. You midwesterners are used to this sort of thing, right? What a waste of a otherwise perfectly good day off!
Carl,I think that love of going to the nursery comes from me. I have always loved going to greenhouses and drooling over all the old favorite flowers and plants and the new odd species that I haven’t seen before. Needless to say, Dad and I have spent a ton of money each year on our yard. I truly love plants and could buy truck loads every year. I don’t think Dad feels this way but he humors me!
I agree, you guys have one awesome yard and the plants always look fantastic! I’m looking forward to seeing the new landscaping.