flowers – Barefoot Lily Lady

A Week of Flowers 2024: Day 2

I’m joining Cathy at Words and Herbs for her annual ‘A Week of Flowers‘ meme, taking place this year November 30 – December 6. Though I’m a day late in joining her this year, I appreciate the opportunity to bring a bit of colorful beauty to our chilly December days. It’s December 1st–the sun was out today making it feel a bit warmer than the 19°F registering on my thermometer. Let’s travel back a few months and look at a few garden photos from Spring of 2024.

Magnolia ‘Elizabeth’ put on a very brief show this spring. A late frost turned her beautiful yellow, tulip-shaped cups brown before they had a chance to fully open. However, I caught a glimpse of what beauty this tree will hold in future springs. ‘Elizabeth’ put on a few inches of growth in her first year in our garden, but is still much smaller than her anticipated mature height of greater than 20 feet.

I have forgotten the names of most of my daffodils, but truly love each one of them. The little white one on the left has a lovely waft of fragrance that truly ought to be bottled. The lovely daffodil on the right is a charmer with peachy ruffled cups.

This lovely tulip stood all by herself for quite a few days before she was joined by a few neighboring tulips. I smiled each time I spied her stalwartly standing her ground in my flowerbed.

If I had to pick a favorite type of tulip, it would most definitely be the Angelique tulips. This magnificent red one looks like a peony. She extends the tulip season by opening a little later in spring and her tight double petals can hold their own when brisk winds fly through on nippy days. When fall arrives, I can’t resist planting a few more Angelique tulip bulbs in anticipation of the next year’s daffodil and tulip performance.

“It was one of those March days when the sun shines hot and the wind blows cold, when it is summer in the light, and winter in the shade.”
― Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

Little Bouquets of Floral Joy

Join me today as I link up with our host The Propagator and a plethora of other gardeners around the world who each post pictures of six things going on in their respective world of gardening. Six things, in the garden, on a Saturday. This week, I decided to show you how I share the beauty of the garden God has blessed with floral abundance.

For as long as I’ve been gardening, Momma always enjoyed it when I shared a little sampler of what was going on in my garden. Last Spring I began bringing her a little bouquet whenever I visit her at BeeHive, her assisted living home. I always put her flowers in her little blue vase she had hanging for years over her kitchen window…you can see the little holes where a rope once looped through to make it a hanging vase. I’ve long since removed the rope, but love this sweet little thing – something I would like to keep as a treasure to remind me of my mom.

Sadly, Alzheimer’s has a way of sucking the joy right out of the things that used to bring Mom pleasure and delight. Mom didn’t seem to enjoy my floral bouquets anymore. One day I decided I’d put her little bouquet on the table where she and 3 or 4 other residents enjoyed their meal. The sheer delight of her friends splashed joy all over me.

It dawned on me that there were two more tables with residents who would love a jar filled with a little floral joy at their table too. The next day, and nearly every day since, I picked a few more flowers and a few little “filler” bits from my garden — three stems of each type of flower or filler. When I arrived at BeeHive to visit Mom, I arranged three nearly identical little bouquets — one for each table.