I love flowers of all kinds, even flowers most consider as lowly as weeds! (See my recent blog on taking weed walks and making weed bouquets!)
I have (almost) never seen a gardening book or magazine, that I didn’t want to open the cover and at least peruse. My library of gardening books numbers well over 300. I buy them at bookstores, garden centers, famous garden gift shops, aka Great Dixter, in England, botanical garden gift shops, thrift stores, gifts from gardening friends, and antique stores. My favorite antique garden books are Sunset Pictorial Garden Book, copyright 1934, and Sunset Western Garden Book, 1942, found in an antique store in Redmond Oregon.
Garden art
I collect garden art – spheres, globes, metal sculptures, old wagons and carts.
I collect antique watering cans. Especially memorable are the ones that I have found on trips to England, France, or Scotland and found a way to get them in a suitcase for our flights home. (It is amazing what you can pack inside a watering can, in fact, if you have some delicate items to bring home, you can place them inside the gardening cans to protect them.
I have a small collection of chimney pots, but especially memorable is the one we* bought in Scotland for $75. Very reasonable, estimated to be over 100 years old and it looked like it. Of course, there was shipping, 60 pounds of brittle antique ceramic. Shipping home from Edinburgh cost a mere $275. (*When I mention that we bought it, that means my husband Don finally understood that if he was going to play golf at St. Andrews, I was going to have a chimney pot from Scotland and he was going to be kind about it and figure out how to ship it home. A fair balance of fun, don’t you think? )
And, of course, I collect plants, literally. Most I love, but some are very bad, like the horsetail that I dug up along the Merced River on a trip to Yosemite. Then I made the mistake of planting in my garden (and not a pot), three or four properties ago. Each time I moved I would bring along a few plants to my “new” garden, unknowingly bringing along the roots of horsetail. Even the expert gardeners can’t figure out how to get rid of it.
My love for flowers
Did I say I love flowers? I love playing in my garden, and I love working in other people’s gardens, and I love visiting gardens. On my website, itsaboutflowers.com, which is where you are now, there is a tab called “Gardens to visit”. It is not meant to be comprehensive or extensive, but it’s where I’ve had fun.
