Hello,
I am an October baby, so maybe that’s why I’ve been thinking about a life in plants. A botanical biography of sorts. And of course when you’re aware of something, you find it everywhere. It started with a line in a recent issue of Dig Delve:
“I think it was Jung who theorized that if you could find the place where you lost yourself as a child, you could find a place of deep meditation and calm as an adult.”
Then the idea really took root after reading
, a newsletter from Alexis Madrigal in which he talks about the wisdom (or not) of grounding a memory in plants. Which leads to an interview with Brianna Loewinsohn, author of Ephemera, a graphic novel she describes as a memoir in plants. That got me thinking about the plants that grew me into a gardener —I tried to name 3.Blackberries would be an early influence, even as a young child I battled the wicked thorns to get at the deeply flavorful berries. Interestingly, blackberries figure in the memories of both Brianna and Alixis as well — I guess not so surprising when you consider the distribution of this invasive (but oh-so-delicious) vine.
Of course, sweet peas have always been a personal totem. A connection that continues to pass from one generation to the next. When a packet of seed moves a grown man to tears recalling his grandmother’s garden, you know a plant has power.
all the rest… I simply couldn’t narrow my choices. Recently, someone asked me how many plants I grow or have grown. I thought about it and then said, that would be like adding up the breaths of a lifetime.
Now it’s your turn. I’d love to hear those plants that grew you into today. I’m so glad you’re here.
xo Lorene
In the store
I often describe my book, Color In and Out of the Garden, as my memoir in paint and plants —and yes, blackberries appear in the introduction. Let’s celebrate a life with and among plants. From 10/14 to 10/19, get 15% off signed copies of my book when you enter the code: LIFE at checkout.
Recent writing: Where Traditions Grow in The Seattle Times. In 2012, the Port Gamble S’Klallam Tribe bought 15 acres on the Kitsap Peninsula not because it was the once world-renowned Heronswood Nursery, but because acquiring land in what used to be their traditional territories is a priority. Heronswood, the nursery, was the source of rare and unusual plants, and home to a (fabulous) woodland garden with some (remarkable) formal perennial plantings. Today Heronswood, the garden, is telling a new story with four new gardens rooted in tribal history.
Recent reading: Gardening can be Murder, How Poisonous Poppies, Sinister Shovels, and Grim Gardens Have Inspired Mystery Writers, by Marta McDowell. In her latest book, the New York Times bestselling writer and avid gardener looks at gardens from the darker side of human nature, after all gardening and obsession have long been willing bedfellows.
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Seeing Color
September 27, 2023
With the coming arrival of the Big Dark, the skies are ponderous as wave after wave of storms pass through the Puget Sound region. But I found the sun hiding in the glowing center of this lone calendula in the back garden.
September 28, 2023
The year has slipped from creamsicle to pumpkin and brown sugar. Another bloom, this one a delicious strawflower, plucked from the Slow Flowers Cutting Garden tended by my dear friend Debra Prinzing. That inner ring of soft green is everything.
September 29, 2023
Tis the season. I have thoughts about brown — they touch on style and fertility, growth and decay. Also, spiders, seed pods and cinnamon toast.
September 30, 2023
September — the LAST day of September — and the sweet peas are still blooming in the garden. For all intents and purposes, the heat and dry days of summer should have shut them down long ago. They look a bit worn, but then don’t we all at this point in the growing season.
I have the vines in a couple of spots in the garden. One is on a drip line, so independent of my ministering, it carries on. But the other didn’t receive regular irrigation. Oh sure, I got the hose out every few days or so, but more on my schedule than what my plants would have appreciated. In a gardening-season-that-wasn’t-a-gardening-season, limited by pain and mobility, my sweet peas, a family totem of sorts, have persisted 6 to 8 weeks beyond expectations. Of course, there’s the comfrey tea, and I’ve had more resilient plants when I began growing them according to the advice of Ardelia Farm.
I am a hands-in-the-dirt gardener who focuses on process. The yield of all this tending is a happy by-product when in fact, the garden is tending to me. This year that looks like sweet peas at the end of September.
October 1, 2023
Practice perpetual kindness.
October 2, 2023
I’m pretty sure Garden Barbie has a candy colored spindle berry (Euonymus europaeus) shrub in the courtyard of her Barbie Dream House.
October 3, 2023
I don’t know what it is about beans but they are one of my favorite plants to grow. I don’t have enough room to produce a reasonable quantity — I just want to watch the vines tangle (I rarely plant dwarf beans).
When the pods appear, things get exciting - speckled pink, green, or yellow. But nothing compares to the magic of shelling the mature pods and revealing the dried beans. This variety from Uprising Seed is called ’San Bernardo Blue’. Originally collected in Italy in a village of the same name, the color (!!) of the bean varies with temperature. Here in the PNW, our cooler temps produce a cobalt blue seed coat. How could I pass that up?!?
Then again, maybe I’m still looking for a golden egg-laying goose.
a brief meditation on gold
What a garden does in one year it takes the rest of us a lifetime to accomplish.
Maybe because I was an October baby, I am especially tuned to the shift in fall, a season of both fruition and depletion. Ample moisture and forgiving temperatures refresh parched plantings. Autumn is both a temporary reprisal of spring and a liminal threshold to dormancy.
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