Why Toddler Picked Flowers are the Best

My children brought me these beautiful flowers this morning when I really needed a lift.  I was trying to finish a giant writing project on a deadline (a grant proposal) and I was feeling stressed and exhausted when they came bounding in with a great sampling of every single thing blooming in the front yard from tiny to large.

I love how young children pick flowers — they go right for the bloom and pull off the very top. They  have zero interest in the things that stress out flower farmers like getting the right stem length.  And once they pick a blossom, they kind of shove them into their palms so they can grab another.  They arrive a little rumpled and without stems but they are still a joy to arrange and look at.

I sometimes think about all the sweet lovely flowers that are overlooked and unknown because they do not fit into the floral industry — which always seems to be a bit more obsessed with stem length, size and vase life than beauty.  So the tiny flowers don’t get much attention — except when the young children burst on the scene.  They  have their eyes on the prize — its about the pretty flowers and that is all — and with that focus they find so many of them.   One of these flowers, the “pink” is actually what the flower breeders created carnations from — making them bigger and far fussier (and in my opinion a lot less lovely).

Today, at around my one month anniversary of starting to sell lots of flowers to a big commercial flower wholesaler, I am happy my children brought me this tiny rumpled bouquet ….which for this mama is prettier than anything in the entire commercial flower warehouse!

By the way, below is another toddler flower image — it is my 2 year old’s honest interpretation of my instruction, “please put the flower back in the vase.”  Again, by the way the stem was tossed aside since it is so not the point.

Shabbat Shalom and/or have a peaceful weekend.

Fashion Week with Work Boots

Post by Cheryl Corson

Echinacea "Pixie Meadowbrite"

I left home just before 7am Wednesday for a 2 hour drive south to Sandy’s Plants near Richmond, Virginia. Sandy McDougle is a retired school teacher with a slight Southern twang, whose 35 acre family home has grown in her retirement to accommodate one of the finest perennial growing facilities in the region. All the well-known retail garden centers around DC get at least some plants from Sandy’s. I use them for my clients, and for our own place outside the city.

Sandy and her Sales Manager Elise host some events in the spring and fall where designers and retailers can preview new cultivars and even vote on what Sandy should consider growing in the future.

Designer’s Day is like Fashion Week with work boots. We get our name tags and a healthy breakfast with coffee, and then Sandy plunges into the 100 page catalog while Elise projects matching plant photographs on the screen in the corner of the darkened room. By noon we’ve made it to “H,” and we vote to grab lunch and keep going.

Sandy serves hot sandwiches, fruit, salad, and dark chocolate brownies. Our group of about 30 designers, mostly women, comment on the plants – how we’ve used this one or that, if they can take more or less sun, shade, or moisture, and how much or little deer like them. It’s mid-February, so we aren’t yet swamped with work, and there’s nothing more fun than talking about plants while eating good food, in the easy company of knowledgeable women who like to share garden stories.

One woman approaches me at lunch to ask about my business. She’s a pediatrician transitioning to garden designer. My other well-established colleague there, I learn in the afternoon, used to be marketing director for Diet Coke. In 1991, I myself left a job as director of Colorado’s public art program to enroll in a 3-year graduate landscape architecture program at Harvard. And here we are, middle aged, smart, happy, wearing comfortable clothes, and doing what we love.

And the plants? I can tell you, for example, after early attempts at breeding orange-hued Echinaceas that turned out to have weak stems, leaving “their faces in the mud,” new cultivars have arrived. Sandy endorses, “Now Cheesier,” “Pow Wow Wild Berries,” “Pixie Meadowbrite,” and well, thirty-seven cultivars of Echinacea alone.

Mid-way, Sandy reminisces about the earliest days of perennial growing, recalling the introduction of plastic gallon pots, not even that long ago. Before that, she says, if you wanted a perennial you had to dig it from your friend’s yard.

Gaura Pink Fountain

I decide to try Gaillardia, Gaura,  Gelsemium, hardy Geranium, and Geum to my gardens to see how they do before specifying them for clients. Sandy sells sixteen cultivars of Gaillardia, but I decide on Grape Sensation. She sells twenty-seven hardy Geranium cultivars, but I’m going to try ‘Biokovo Karmina.’  We make it through the alphabet by 2pm, enough time to walk through the gardens, greenhouses, and some production beds and drive a hundred miles home, full of ideas.

Cheryl Corson is a gardener, writer, and landscape architect.  Her website is www.cherylcorson.com