the grower
I don’t remember a time that I was not obsessed with the natural world. As a child, dirt was my security blanket, and the earth under my bare feet energized me. The germination of a seed was miraculous, and a flower in bloom was the most intriguing and beautiful of all of God’s creations.
My interest in flora was first sparked as a 6 year old in the thickets surrounding our Texas farmhouse, where wild wisteria blooms magically appeared in early spring, hanging like lavender chandeliers from the woods around our farmhouse, while a rainbow of four o’clocks volunteered their scheduled blooms in the fields behind the chicken coop, opening for the day, and twisting themselves to bed before my eyes every evening. Beladonna lilies shoved their naked stems from random spots in yards and roadsides, blooming their perfume into the warm evenings. My mother planted a row of colorful zinnias beneath the front windows, and the neglected compost pile in the pasture offered me mysterious seedlings that grew to produce cherry tomatoes and odd squash hybrids…with only the few random handfuls of water I supplied them from the horse trough on especially hot days.
When my obsession with flowers resulted in my bringing home bouquets of stolen blooms from neighboring yards as a teenager, which I sometimes picked under the cover of darkness, my appalled mother allowed me to fill the small island around the hawthorn tree in the front yard with flowers of my choosing. I filled it with the most inharmonious mix of pastel pansies and brightly colored tiger monkey flowers, and stood back with undeserved satisfaction. I gazed proudly on that bed every day, carefully choosing the most perfect pansy faces to be placed in my flower press, and dumping seeds from tiny brown pods into my hands to study or save for future generations of flowers.
Then came mini greenhouses made from comforter and bedding bags on the back deck, obsessive seed package purchases, grow lights in the crawl space, and trays of seedlings on the trampoline on sunny days. Carefully tucking seeds from spent blooms into pockets, window sills full of sprouted cuttings, dahlia and zinnia cross pollination trials, constant dreaming of greenhouse designs, and the development of an unhealthy plant buying habit.
Honestly, it all continues to this day; and finally, after a 30+ year obsession, I have found permission to soothe the ever-present ache for my hands to be in the dirt, to admire blooms, and the insects that visit them, to over-tend newly emerged seedlings, and spend my days in a garden, where my soul is soothed by growing and sharing a bounty of flowers and vegetables with my family and those that also appreciate them.
I currently grow on a 2-acre plot in Battle Ground, WA with my husband and children, where my focus is heirloom organic vegetables, and beautiful blooms for cut flower bouquets.