Garden Dreams

I woke up this morning and threw back the drapes, and OHhhh!, there was this glorious bougainvillea!   It had a couple blossoms last week, but now it's going crazy!  I stuck it in the bay window, last fall  before frost, so it could winter indoors.  It looks like a jungle in my bedroom!  There's also a banana tree,  a mandevilla, some other large tropical plants and assorted houseplants.  I have no where else to put them in my small mobile home,  and I want them alive and well, for the porch and patio come summer.

 I also convalesce the African Violets that are not blooming, in this area.   It's my "plant hospital".
The blooming ones are displayed more prominently throughout the house, but the sick plants go hide in my bedroom.  Do you do that too?



 There is a beautiful deep purple hydrangea out front of my home, and I dried a couple blossoms. They dry such a pretty blue shade!   Next year I will save more!

Top of my bedroom  dresser.

 A kalanchoe  atop of my microwave, from my little Valentines

Here are my garden books.
Now is the time to read about gardening, before everything is growing
 and there are so many gardening tasks to be done.

Amy's dried roses

"What is so special about a rose that it seems far more than a flower?  Perhaps it is the mystery it has gathered through the ages. Perhaps it is the joy that it continues to give, humans have constantly  used it to transmit sentiments that they lack words to express, for the rose is different......." Princess Grace of Monaco writes in My Book Of Flowers.  This wonderful book, published in 1980, by Doubleday &Co. tells the history of many flowers and flowers in art, stories and poems, and the meaning and myths of flowers and herbs, "and the enchantment they bring into your life".

My toys, a collection of  Marjolein Bastin's miniatures, and a cute sign

  I dream of a garden where Tommy and I will sit on my little cement bench, have a picnic and watch butterflies.  We'll pick fresh herbs to use in our dinner dishes when we cook, and a handful of posies for his mommy when she gets home from work.  I will help him plant seeds and watch them grow.
I will grow some Jersey tomatoes, and  peppers.
  "Parsley, sage, rosemary  and thyme......." (Pardon me, while I sing!)
   I have to replace my beloved herb garden, I miss it so!
I wish I had a pond. I left that behind too, last summer.  Perhaps I can have a patio pond, a container pond with a little fountain, and a few fishes, at my new home.  Yes!  I shall!

My mother's favorite hymn is "In the Garden".  I  just read that C. Austin Miles, the writer of one of the most popular gospel hymns ever written,  wrote this in a "dreary, dark New Jersey basement that didn't even have a window. let alone a garden view".  I felt sad for him, so I researched it further, and learned what his great-granddaughter,  or Wikipedia  failed to mention, that he was a faithful  man, who had a vision while reading John 20 in his Bible, about Mary visiting Jesus' grave.   He was once a pharmacist, but he said  he  wanted to be remembered  most for writing these songs, because that how he was of the most use to his Master.
The song was published in 1912, and became popular when the Billy Graham Staff regularly used it.  Two of my childhood  favorites, Roy Rogers and Dale Evans recorded it in 1950, and then Perry Como recorded it in 1958.  I often sing it to myself in the garden. (sigh)

"One is closer to God in a garden,

than anywhere else on earth."    

Sweet dreams of gardens to you!

Love, Linda