To Chelsea on Her 21st Birthday

Chelsea is my eldest niece and she loves nature. 

Me, well, I love this kid—and the other two girls too. 

Before I had a garden to help me bury the pains caused by a rare illness, I found a lot of happiness and joy in these three beautiful creatures. 

These 3 are a creative triple threat, but most of the time, they just "are".

We've seen many of the wonders of the Pacific Northwest together, and as a child, she and her younger sister Lindsey and their best friend Emily went all over the place with me—looking at plants, and other stuff. 

You know, just normal nature stuff like this.

If I never have a child, it's ok since I've always had Chelsea. 

And she likes to think she's my only child. 

 And when I see pictures like this I know we are related to one another.

 We've always got Emily too.

 Chelsea has taken our relationship quite seriously for many years. 

 Sometimes, she reminds me a lot of my dad. 

I guess that's where our quirks originated. 

My brother (her dad) is pretty goofy too. 

 She likes animation. I used to watch a lot of it with her. I guess I taught her to value certain things in life too. 

 I think she's a bit more colorful than I am at times, but that's not an issue. She is her own garden. 

At heart she loves animals and nature. 

When I graduated from college I was so proud she was there to see me succeed. 

My friend Brendan, the guy with his eyes shut, well he later acted as college art instructor to the young woman who became Chelsea's high school art instructor. 

I am happy she grew up around art. I sure wish I had! Although I wish Chelsea was making more art right now. She is a very talented artist. 

She grew up around plants too and this image is from a Seattle trip to attend the Northwest Flower & Garden Show. (Sorry about the quality of this photo. It was rescued.)

Here first tattoo was of the much more common orange California poppy. 

Taking the girls on road trips to CA was a great deal of fun for me. 

And here we have Emily and Chelsea again. They were helping me to load pavers into the wagon after a friend our family had passed away. We wanted to use the pavers in my garden. 

So often when I see the beauty in the small details of flowers I think of Chelsea. She sees even more beauty in the world than I. Too often my brain and words get in my way.

As girls, both Chelsea and her sister Lindsey liked to be a bit different.

Of course I encouraged this kind of thing.

When I worked at Frank Lloyd Wright's Gordon House it was wonderful to see them all during visits. They were just kids and they enjoyed the house and absorbed its design.

I am not so sure they liked his Marin County building as much, but they saw it. 

Chelsea loves her little sister Lindsey and I think this is one of my favorite pictures I've ever taken of her. 

Emily is a bird of a different feather. That's why we love her so much.

Like any aunt I prefer to think of them like this—tiptoeing through the tulips. 

Of course Chelsea had to shock us all a bit—especially her little sister. 

Not having had sisters it was a blessing to watch these little women grow.

They opened up a whole new world to me and I needed it. 

Chelsea will always be "so metal" when she rakes. 

She will always be a garden design sceptic. 

Happy Birthday Chelsea. 

Happy Birthday.

Happy. Happy.
Birthday.

Someday all three of you will be gardeners and I know it. It is in your blood on both sides. So get out there and keep doing what you do until you land and dig deeper to set down your own roots. Whatever you do, it will be beautiful like you. 

It's the Unplanned, a Thing Called Life, in the Garden

"One never reaches home, but wherever friendly paths intersect 

the whole world looks like home for a time." Hermann Hesse

A great deal has recently grown in this garden—both intended and otherwise. Many of my new plants, sown this year from seeds sent to me in the mail only last winter, have borne great and rich floral beauties. I never know what to expect, so much so, that when things finally grow and bloom, they are always certain to cause me great surprise and excitement. That's seriously how I garden!

The False Freesia below was a bit of a shock when I returned from Seattle. I had no idea what it was, but after checking my charts, I figured it out. I ordered these seeds from the American Horticultural Society last winter. Another member donated them to their annual seed sale and I am so glad! I'd never seen them before and I hope I can overwinter them outside. They are bulbs grown from seed, and I am thrilled they bloomed during their first season. I am seriously impressed.

False Freesia, Anomatheca laxa.

This Lobelia cardinalis had been sitting in its planter for two years. This past spring I finally planted it in the ground. It too is blessing me with its blooms right now, but this plant story is different than the last one.

My mother loves Fan Scarlet Lobelia and wanted tons of them so a few years ago I figured out what I needed to grow more for her. Since the plant is a F1 hybrid I had to purchase pelleted Fan Scarlet seeds from a reputable grower. After doing so, that year, the seeds all grew perfectly.

The effort was not quite enough though to soothe my mom's curiosity. She still didn't understand after that season why I couldn't just collect the seeds from her new plants to make more of the Fan Scarlets. Instead of reexplaining hand pollination to her, I just told her I'd collect the seeds and then show her what would happen later.

As you've already guessed, this is what happened. A few of the seeds reverted back to the Lobelia cardinalis, while many of them stayed sterile. What was Mom's response? She complained at first because several of the ones I gave her failed to thrive, but late last summer she told me that the handful that did might actually be prettier to her than the Fan Scarlet. Go figure!

Cardinal Flower, Lobelia cardinalis. 

My dependable old-timer has bloomed again and this loyal garden companion is going to have its seeds harvested this year finally. Life without it would be difficult for me and I must have more in the future.

A few years ago I visited the Hollyhock House in Los Angeles where I purchased hollyhock seeds in their Gift Shop. The package said it was a mix, and I grew them all, but most were sold at the Frank Lloyd Wright house museum where I used to work. (The funds were used to purchase additional plants for the Gordon House.) This was the last plant though, and I chose to plant it at our home. I am so happy it turned out so beautiful and that its parents were once hollyhocks at the Hollyhock House.

Heirloom Hollyhock, Alcea rosea. 

After many months, I finally got the garden menagerie together for the foster kids. Last winter we assembled this motley crew up in Seattle at the Northwest Flower and Garden Show. The weather has been so bad though this past spring and summer I only just recently let the gang out. I think they make quite a nice team, don't you?

With much work to come, I am finally cleaning up the garden. Last week, an x-ray showed that last month I broke two bones on my right hand, and although they've both healed, they still are not well. I am trying not to think about all the lost time, but this summer has been rough. It's the unplanned things that really determine what happens sometimes, and in my life, I must always expect the unexpected.

My little old lady cat Macavity has helped me through some rough spots recently. She is 15 years old now and is one of most intelligent cats I've ever known. Not long after I was diagnosed with primary immune issues, she developed health problems too. Just recently, she's begged me to ignore all of her skin rashes, and to forget her hip problems because she just wants to be a cat during these last few weeks of summer. She's now allowed to be outside whenever she wants to and she is very happy. I guess she's earned it by being so nice to all the children, even when she shouldn't be, yet she's always willing to give them a chance.

Last Friday my cats enjoyed sitting beneath me as I crashed in our hammock for the first time this summer. It was great just to rest. So many things have been making me really tired and I just never have the time to sleep. At least in my hammock it looked and felt like summer if only to my eyes. It was enough, just what I needed, and it filled me with great joy for several hours.

Random Arts & Crafts Progress

It is getting late and my husband is in the kitchen making preparations for our street's first block party tomorrow. He is the trained chef, I am not, and I am grateful that he is here for a visit from the vineyard in CA because I have needed his help dearly in the last few weeks. As much as I love the summer, and I love my garden, this time of the year is always very hard for me physically here in the NW, especially with little physical help available to me, but this has been the best summer I've had in many years so I am not complaining.

In the garden there are a few special blooms to share right now. One is the first bloom I've seen on an unusual plant in our collection while the other is purely a sentimental bloom from a pass-along I purchased seeds for at a museum in Los Angeles. 

This is the only bloom on the Crinodendron hookerianum (aka Chilean Lantern Tree) in the backyard and it is our first. This is a shrub I planted 2 or 3 years ago and I'd forgotten about since it nearly dies every winter but then it springs back to life just in time for winter to slam it down hard again so it's easy to miss in the mess. Maybe we've turned the corner on those days though since there are more blooms to come; they just haven't reached maturity yet. I like what I see though.

The other bloom I wanted to post is on a hollyhock in my garden, single and white, planted from seeds I purchased at Frank Lloyd Wright's Hollyhock House in Los Angeles. The plant itself is pretty roughed up with rust, but I just couldn't yank it out. It is one of those sentimental things for me, reminding me of a time not that long ago when I was well enough to work, albeit briefly, doing something I'd studied for, and which I loved a great deal. 

Back when I worked at The Gordon House I applied for one of the small scholarships offered by the Frank Lloyd Wright Conservancy in Chicago to attend an annual Frank Lloyd Wright Conservancy Conference and I was granted that dream. It is a city I have visited many times now, both before and after, but that visit was very special since I attended many events and I saw the interiors of homes that very few members of the public are ever allowed to see. I also met Dion Neutra in his home in Silver Lake—the son of the architect Richard Neutra—and he was a really kind man who inspired me with his humility and kindness. 

At night, after the conference tours, I'd wander off by myself to Pasadena for their annual Craftsmen Weekend with events organized around the designs of Greene & Greene. I was experiencing the best of both worlds in my mind, and I even skipped a party with Hollywood producer Joel Silver so that I could spend an evening dining at the Gamble House. I have never regretted that choice and I will always remember that event as well as the smashing party at the home once owned by Ernest Batchelder, a leading tile designer during the American Arts & Crafts Movement. 

At that party I stayed late, wandering in circles around the property, between the house and the old artisan's studio, lingering near the tiled fountain grotto at the far edge of the property in the back corner of the garden, and then finally in the kitchen, dining room, and living room with the magnificent fireplace. Eventually I spoke with the homeowner, a retired professor who'd spoken that day at my conference, and he was overjoyed that I was such a turncoat. I'd left Frank, and his cult, to spend an evening with someone else's designs, and we both knew that I would live to tell about it. 

This beaten up hollyhock is there to remind me now of my past and of my future, but mostly of my past and I am sad about that. Gardens are so often designed with such sentimental tales attached to their owner's plant choices and this often drives those among us "nuts" when nothing makes sense in the design or is too disorganized for us to understand what the person was thinking or saying. There is often order to such gardens, but is is not often apparent, or it is written in a language that we do not understand, or were never intended to understand. These gardens are the most private, since they do not communicate to us, and are written in code. They are the gardens meant for only a few, sometimes only one, and I am beginning to think that we are folk gardeners creating outsider art as we call it in the art world. This just may not be what I want to communicate though and I have been spending a lot of time thinking over this recently. 

Sometimes I really struggle with what my garden is saying, if it is saying anything at all to others. Writing this has elucidated a great deal to me though and I look forward now to thinking about it some more. All of this was also stirred up by my still not having spun together a name for the place, because this  kind of a vision is really required and necessary at this point. 

I guess it's back to the midnight drawing board with the smoking panda up at the park above my house. That is unless they have banned graffiti from smoking too. Life is simply too short to make gardens so serious and staid. 

Driving to Silverton

The drive from Portland to Silverton has always been beautiful, but during this time of the year, it is especially lovely. One of the reasons why I was so excited to drive down there today to deliver a case of wine for a fundraiser at the Gordon House was because I suspected that the flower fields would be in bloom. I was so happy that my hunch was correct!

This was the first field we saw before our visit with my former boss. It is just before you enter Silverton if you are entering the town by way of State Highway 213 from Interstate-205. (This road passes through Molalla and a few other small towns. The most unusual of which is the tiny town of Liberal, Oregon.)

These two fields were ones my foster respite and I saw on the way home by way of State Highway 214. They are just outside of the town of Mt Angel if you are headed back west toward the town of Woodburn or Interstate-5. The poppies were not fully blooming, but it was still a sight to see. 

Silver Falls Seed grows these flowers for seed. Each year I order from them online and I can assure you that they have quality seed. It is one of the few ways that I do truly buy local when I am able. You can see why I support their business, as do others in their community. 

http://www.silverfallsseed.com/

Once we were in Silverton, after a quick stop at Roth's Grocery Store, we drove over to meet with Molly at the Gordon House in The Oregon Garden. The house museum is separate from the garden and the resort but it works as an additional attraction to the area. Designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, it was saved from destruction almost a decade ago when the property and home were purchased by homeowners who'd intended for it to become a teardown. It is the only structure Frank Lloyd Wright designed in Oregon and I used to work there part-time. 

During this trip I didn't take many pictures of the house, but this is one view of it. It is the most amazing thing to photograph though and every angle is different. It really is amazing. 

This is a remnant of one of the many plants I planted there. It it a lovely Penstemon. 

My foster weekender took this photo of the red-twig dogwoods berries. 

Mimulus cardinalis is one of my favorites and I believe I may have planted this one. 

Here is the view from the entrance as we left. It was a lovely day to deliver a case of wine, and it was fun to introduce a part-time foster child to beautiful architecture. The place was calming for both of us, and we really enjoyed the drive. 

If you would like more information about the Gordon House, you can visit their Web site:

http://www.thegordonhouse.org/home.html

Hollyhock House Hollyhock

A few years ago I attended a conference in Los Angeles hosted by the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy. While there, we visited all of the cement block homes in the LA area, including the Hollyhock House. Although not my favorite structure due to the confusion of the architecture—too many hands in any project can do that—I still enjoyed it. Their gift shop at the time had only one small object I could afford. Seeds are always just the right price in my book. After some delay, I finally planted some at home, and this is a bloom from one of them. I'd show you more, but due to some neglect, they are not exactly upright citizens in my garden and tend to nap a bit too much. Hollyhocks are, for some strange reason, a favorite of mine. A traditional cottage garden plant, they can be difficult, but I'd rather have them any day over fussy hybrid tea roses.