ByGD
Well that’s a clickbaity title if I ever wrote one.
This classic car parked in a community garden on the roof of a parking garage in lower Queen Anne, and planted with perennials and ornamental grasses. The windows are painted with poetry:
Strange beautiful grass of green, with your
JMH
Majestic silver seas, your mysterious mountains I
wish to see closer, may I land my kinky machine?
ByGD
Roses are so evocative of the English garden, it’s easy to forget that garden roses originated in China.
ByGD
Last week it was pansies. This week it’s the carnation. Lately I’m all about defending mistreated flowers. Carnations have sort of a bad image. They’re hospital flowers. They get stuck in buttonholes, not because people like them, but because they aren’t messy. Stiff and sort of sterile, like fake flowers. But they used to be very popular in Victorian gardens, and even today you don’t have to look very hard to find really cute varieties.
When you bother to look close at the intricate petals, you also notice that they are fragrant. Carnations have a really unusual, but pleasant, sort of peppery scent. It’s quite masculine for a floral – maybe that’s how they first became associated with boutonnières. It might also account for their older common name, Sweet William. Isn’t that a much nicer name than carnation? Doesn’t it make you think of snuggling a just-washed little boy? Or resting your head on the shoulder of someone warm and sort of peppery smelling?
ByGD
Pansy. When I was a kid, that was a common insult to someone’s masculinity. I guess because pansies have such floofy petals? I don’t know. Peonies are rufflier. Anyway, growing up in the Sonoran Desert, I was more familiar with the insult than the real-life flower. So I was delighted to discover that pansies are actually really hardy little flowers. Seriously, they’re almost impossible to kill. They come in a bazillion cheerful colors and bloom during the gray days of early spring when everything else is still cowering under a layer of mulch. Pansies kick ass. And they sort of look like they’re smiling the whole time.
