About seven or eight years springtimes ago, at a past house, I decided to plant my first garden.
I had few domestic skills in my 20s and I did little to cultivate any. But something changed after I turned 30. I asked my mother for a power drill my birthday and she got it for me in earnest. Then I decided, kind of rashly and stubbornly, that I wanted to draw butterflies to my yard with blue and purple flowers.
I ordered young butterfly bushes and globe thistle from a Pennsylvania nursery in springtime. They all arrived tender and green and weeks, if not a year, from blossoming. As I collected supplies at a garden center, I saw a raft of deep blue and periwinkle Lobelia. These were the sky-like colors I wanted in my piece of chopped-up earth, so I bought some and planted it that day. It was some of the only color in that garden until late summer.
My son wanted to get me flowers for Mother’s Day this year. When Dan took him to a nursery, Declan spotted what he wanted immediately: A hanging basket, filled mostly with purple petunias and blue Lobelia.
“I love them,” he told me when he showed them to me with a voilá wave of his arms.
So do I.
Hope your Mother’s Day was happy.
Copyright Tracy Zollinger Turner, Tinymantras.com, 2009.
Absolutely lovely.