Love

Dutch tulips from their beds

Flaunted their stately heads.

- James Montgomery

picture via roberta freyman

Forcing the Issue

I love forcing bulbs all winter long. I am invigorated to see green shoots and dark brown dirt in the middle of these cold New England winters. We have a beautiful amaryllis on the dining table as I type (it is white and so not christmas-y) and I am onto my second batch of narcissus in my kitchen. Here is an old picture from my San Francisco mantle, where I forced some bulbs in February.

I spy

There is so much to ooh and ahhh at in this issue of Lonny Magazine, but I did have to comment that this is a GREAT technique to reign in those floppy (but lovely) paperwhites!

Brad Ford, I like your style -- bamboo and raffia, two must haves in this house!

image via lonnymag.com

Easy Fall Flower Arrangement

This is a fun hostess gift in the fall. I brought this to a friend's dinner party back when we were living in SF (oh the good old days).

Buy a small pumpkin and hollow out a decent hole (remove all seeds etc). Soak some Oasis foam for a while in water and cut it to fit inside a the pumpkin. Then the fun begins: you can arrange dahlias, tulips, roses or whatever fun flowers you have available to you.

TGIF-I hope you have a great weekend. We are headed down to the Cape to my parents' new house. I can't wait to share some pictures of their new beach getaway (which is 1 hour from here - door-to-door - woo hoo!).

Also, thanks to those who have been giving me feedback about the blog!

I *really* love comments and feedback and welcome all readers to this blog.

I hope it serves some purpose to others besides being a fun and creative pursuit of my own. Ciao.

Mandevilla

These climbing beauties came with a wooden trellis behind them but I fashioned my own bamboo (slipped this one past Tom:-) sticks and some raffia to gain a little more height near our front door. I got the bamboo at Home Depot and I had a bag of raffia lying around - you should be able to get natural raffia at gift stores or garden centers.

I stuck four sticks at the corner of the planters and brought them together like a tepee at the top, wove the raffia in and out and around - then tied it with a square knot, wrapped some of the errant climbers around the bamboo, and viola- just the look I was going for!

Spring Happiness

A lovely image I found from the Royal Horticultural Society website.

If you like the way that looks, John Derian has some nice new plate designs...

Appreciation for Roses

I don't know why, but I was never much of a rose person. I have always gravitated to other flowers both for arranging and garden design. It took our move to San Diego, and the introduction to Ken at Armstrong Gardens in Encinitas, for me to mature into a rose person. Armstrong Garden Center is a chain (not unlike Mahoney's here in the Boston area). The people who work at the store in Encinitas are so helpful and nice and while we lived in Encinitas I got to be friendly with two guys at the store who were freaky good gardeners. Their enthusiasm for roses rubbed off on me and I started to look at different varieties online and began to take notice of them wherever I went.

In the fall, Armstrong comes out with a rose catalog (paper and online) and you can preorder any kind of rose you can imagine. The roses arrive in January as a rootball for planting. My sister in law, who has quite the green thumb, turned me onto roses in a major way. She and I poured over the catalog and then ordered several varieties. It felt very exciting - sort of like it used to feel when I anxiously flipped through a paper catalog (like J.Crew) in high school and picked out the roll neck sweater of my dreams then waited for its arrival like a love letter.

I plan on growing some roses at our new home and I continue to look at new varieties online (see links below). For now, I live vicariously through pictures and visits to my sister in law's garden, where her roses are always blooming.



http://www.armstronggarden.com/

http://www.davidaustinroses.com/

Cal-Mart and Flowers

If you read my sister's blog, you will learn she is slightly obsessed with local grocery stores and would someday like to open her own grocery/specialty food shop. Maybe it is in the genes because there is no doubt that I spent far too much money and time at Calmart while living in San Francisco. It was my go-to for most everything except fish, which I got at Bryan's up the street. I was friendly with the butchers and even had my favorite check-out girl, Mel, for whom I would sit in the longest line. In addition there was a little bakery Sweet Things that had a section of the store by the front door (smart) and I was a sucker for their selection of great cocktail napkins and greeting cards.

Here are some Cal-Mart shots found using google images:























































Every Saturday at 4pm Cal-Mart would mark down flowers 50%. They carried great cut flowers like rununculus, peonies, tulips and more. The flowers were always fresh and relatively well-priced to start out with (compared to a Whole Foods, for example) - so this was a great deal in my mind. I started to notice that some of the more savvy ladies of Presidio heights would have the best flowers in their carts well before the announcement came over the loud speaker. Their tactic was simple, grab your coffee and stroll down to Cal-Mart at around 3:15, fill the cart with the most perfect of all cut flowers and *then* shop for groceries. By the time 4 o'clock came around these cougars were in line to pay while all of the other suckers looking for flowers for their dinner party were fighting over the dahlias at the ends of the checkout counters. It didn't take long for me to become one of the flower hoarders, too.
This is what I am talking about when I say fresh flowers....
















Here are some of the arrangements I made out of these discounted flowers ala Cal-Mart: