prequel: 1988—That Bouquet & Ann Lovejoy

The bouquet that changed my life in spring of 1988:  It was on an outdoor table at a Friday Harbor café and I did not know what the flowers were but had never seen anything more gorgeous. It stirred something about flower gardening that had lain dormant, as up till then I had mostly grown veg around the existing framework of my grandmother’s old garden.

You can see the staple marks from my having this photo on the wall.Now I know that the bouquet, which since then I think of as “THAT bouquet” (of great significance) includes cup and saucer Campanula, Calendula, some phlox, maybe some candytuft and bachelor buttons.

I also remember looking into someone’s garden in Friday Harbor, over a picket fence, and photographing a little flower patch containing Cosmos and Bachelor Buttons, although I did not know what they were at the time.

While on San Juan Island, I took some other photos that I still like:

a handsome building: The Elite Hotel

a hotel in Roche Harbor

a San Juan mansion

a corner of the parlour at the B&B in Friday Harbor

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mosaic at Wallingford Tilth

On another life-changing day in late summer 1988 I attended an Ann Lovejoy lecture (with glorious slides) at Seattle Tilth’s  harvest fair at their Good Shepherd location in Wallingford.   She spoke quickly and with almost breathless enthusiasm and joyousness.  She advised “Make beautiful dirt” and showed slides of her glorious little garden on Capitol Hill.  Someone had walked by her garden and asked her to write a column for the Seattle Weekly and thus her career as a garden writer was born.  In early ’88 her columns had inspired me to dig up my parking strip, but I still did not know about perennials.  The columns had been gathered into her first book, The Year in Bloom (c. 1987).   You will find her mentioned often in this journal because that lecture transformed my life as did That Bouquet.

She spoke in botanical Latin, which I don’t think I had ever heard.  When she recommended and showed an irresistible photo of Oenothera berlandieri (which she pronounced ee-NOTH-era, so I never would have guessed it started with an O), she comfortingly said not to worry about the name, just ask for evening primrose, “the pink one”.

Within a year of studying plant books, I learned many plant names just sort of by osmosis, it seemed;  I had never found anything so easy to learn.   Within a year I was able to identify many plants as I walked around Seattle neighbourhoods and that ability added enormously to the daily pleasure of life. My garden quickly became transformed.  My life transformed more slowly, but the transition to full time gardener had begun.  The Year in Bloom was the second gardening book I ever acquired (the first being Katharine S. White’s Onward and Upward in the Garden which I had bought just because I liked The New Yorker). I now have over 200, all well read.  But those by Ann Lovejoy are still among the top favourites.