Tag Archives: camellias

My Passion for Flowers

My first recollection of flowers was when I was ten and my family lived in the countryside in England. Across the road from our house was a forest which, that spring, was carpeted in bluebells.

I took my family’s scrub bucket into those woods, squatted down in the middle of the bluebells, and picked them. Milky juice squirted out of their stalks and trailed down my arms, making me sticky from hand to shoulder. When the bucket was full, I took it back home into the kitchen, knelt down to find my mother’s vases, and cut the bluebells’ stems to fit into them. Soon all the vases were full, but I found some quart Mason jars and filled them, too. Then, I put a vase of flowers on every bookcase and dresser in the house. My mother smiled when she saw them.

I love flowers. Flowers in my garden. Flowers in vases. The floral department in the grocery store. Flower fabrics and clothes. Flower pillows and bedspreads. Flower photographs and paintings. I just can’t get enough of them. Let me describe how my fascination with flowers has made my world beautiful.

Flowers Connect Me to My Mother

My mother loved flowers, too. Her name was Rose Marie and her favorite flower was a rose. When she lived in an assistant living facility near the end of her life, I brought her a bouquet of roses every time I visited. After my visit was over and I went back home, she would call me to tell me how the flowers were doing, when she had watered them, and where she had placed them in her studio.

But my mother had demonstrated her love for flowers all through my childhood. While we lived in England, she planted tulip and daffodil bulbs in front of our living room window. In spring, those bulbs bloomed like happy children and made our simple home bright and cheery.

When we moved back to California, my parents planted flowers all over their property. They took out the front yard grass and planted daffodils under the trees. Some of the trees were orange trees, and the combination of the yellow daffodils and the oranges was striking.

Easter lilies were planted in the back yard so that they would bloom for the Easter season, which was important to my family. Azaleas were planted in the shade, and my parents planted camelia bushes all along the patio railing. They bloomed all winter like red, pink, and white Christmas ornaments hanging amongst the glossy leaves. My mother would often comment on the camelias during our phone calls. Their buds were out. They were just about to bloom. They were in full bloom. One bush was white and the next was red. The humming birds liked them. We could have a whole conversation about her flowers.

A Flower Library

I’m an avid reader and have a library in my house. In my library, are books that I used during my teaching career such as the plays of William Shakespeare, The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, poems by Robert Frost, and the novels of more contemporary authors such as Toni Morrison and Tara Westover. But I’m retired now, and I’m starting a new collection of books based on the theme of flowers.

I was inspired to start a library about flowers when I read an article about Martha Stewart’s flower library. In the magazine, I found a picture of her bright book room with books stacked on mismatched tables around the perimeter and in the middle of the room. Every wall was filled with windows above the tables, making the room fabulous for reading. The books themselves were beautiful covered with photographs of roses, azaleas, and bouquets of every kind.

Now that I’m retired, I have more time for gardening, and, this summer, I’m in the middle of re-designing my front and back yards. To do this right, I bought a book about hydrangeas so I can do what I need to do so they grow healthy and vibrant. I also bought a book about 300 varieties of tea roses since I’m going to plant six new rose bushes along my new western fence. Oh yes, I also bought a book about French flower arrangements that I have displayed in my French décor living room.

Flowers, Flowers, Everywhere in the House

As soon as people step into my home, they learn how obsessed I am with flowers. In the living room, I am using three artificial flower arrangements to create a beautiful ambiance. Currently, I also have a vase filled with over a dozen red, yellow, and white roses from my own rose bushes in the back yard. I have bouquets of artificial flowers in each of the three bedrooms, flower urns in the library, and a real Christmas cactus in the family room. My bedroom walls all have pictures of flowers in them. The guest room, which also has a French theme, has a photograph of a flower vendor shop in Paris.

Flowers, Not Chocolate

Here’s a secret. I can be bribed, not with chocolates, but with flowers. When anyone gives me flowers, my heart melts like a warm candle. My husband gives me roses and sometimes other types of flowers on Christmas, my birthday, and Valentine’s Day. I love each and every bouquet as if it is the only bouquet I’ve ever received.

My daughter gives me flowers often because she loves flowers too. Her favorite flower is the Gerber Daisy. When I want to get her some blooms, I look first for those.

The most beautiful flowers I have ever received, however, were pink roses from my son. The pink was so delicate and the roses were incredible as buds and astonishing when they were fully bloomed. I took photo after photo of them, and, now, I have two photographs of these roses upstairs. My heart skips a beat whenever I see them.

I’m inspired by beauty and that’s why I love flowers. This afternoon, I plan to read more about how to perfect hydrangeas and how to promote more blooms on all my blossoming plants. You can find me sitting in my garden amongst my flowers. Where else?

Rosie’s Blooms

My mother’s name was Rose Marie—most appropriate for when she attended church, sitting at the end of the third row, her mouth pursed into a straight line and her eyes staring obediently at the altar.  Yet, one of her male friends called her “Rosie,” which, most of the time, suited her better.  She was feisty, knew how to get you to do what she wanted, and a woman with the most interesting hobbies.  One of her favorite hobbies was her appreciation of flowers. 

It’s not surprising, then, that I’ve loved flowers since I was a little girl.  When I was four years old, playing house with my younger brother, my mother grew calla lilies in a corner of the back yard.  I admired heir smooth, white bell-shaped flowers and bright, yellow pistils, and my mother called them “resurrection” flowers because they bloomed around Easter time when Jesus rises from the dead. 

My mother cut the lilies and took them indoors to decorate our dining room table.  I loved their intoxicating scent–a comforting aroma of clover mixed with a lemony fragrance.  Their creamy-textured petals exuded luxury, and they lasted longer than most other cut flowers.

When we lived in Air Force base housing for four years in England, my mother planted bulbs in the rectangular planting beds under the windows in the front yard.  After the snow melted in late January, daffodils poked their green shoots out of the brown soil.  Day by day, I watched them grow bigger and taller.  The flower knobs soon formed, and, slowly, pastel yellow flowers peeked out from the green stalks until one day they brightened our simple front yard with happy yellow fringed trumpets. 

After the daffodils lost their blaze, the tulips came up behind them like copycats—rising like slender dolls out of the earth until, in a few weeks, their red cups of petals swayed in the light breezes of March.  My mother told me to never pick a tulip because they represented perfect love, and she wanted them to bloom for as long as possible to bring good luck to our home. The variety of tulips that she grew were just right—not too showy, not too dramatic, not overly romantic.  When they were blooming, our front yard felt comfortable and stable.

Across the street from this house on Shepherd’s Way was a forest where bluebells bloomed in mass profusion every April and May.  English bluebells are associated with fairies, those miniature creatures that cause mischief for humans.  I had a wistful imagination, and I spent hours walking amongst these bluebells with their sticky stems, watching for fairies and feeling grateful for the experience of being lost in a sea of blossoms. 

My mother let me take a bucket out to the forest and fill it full of bluebells.  I brought them home and arranged them in as many vases I could find, and when the vases were full, I used Mason jars for the rest of the flowers.  I placed vases and jars full of the humble bluebells on bookcases, tables, dressers, and night stands, and my mother’s blue eyes lit up when she saw them.

My high school years were dominated by carnations.  Homecomings, proms, dances, and balls called for corsages, and corsages always came as carnations.  After the dances, I saved each corsage by sticking its stem into a tiny vase of water.   Later, I dried it out on a saucer on my dresser, and, often, lifted it to my nose to inhale its floral and peppery scent. My mother didn’t like them because their scent reminded her of funerals and sadness.

When I was seventeen, my mother and I visited The Berkeley Rose Garden, a colorful display built into the hills of Berkeley comprised of hundreds of varieties of roses and thousands of individual rose bushes.  The rose beds were terraced on the hills into the shape of an amphitheater and separated by flagstone paths. 

My mother taught me the differences between polyantha roses, floribunda roses, and tea roses, and she explained how new roses were developed by cross-breeding every year.  I liked the polyantha buses for their smaller heights and tightly packed blooms.  I liked the floribunda bushes for their profusion of blossoms on branching stems, especially the varieties that produced variegated blooms like “purple tiger”—roses with streaks of purple, lavender, and white in each flower.  These showy bushes had other dramatic names, too, like Celestial Night, Scentimental, Sweet Madame Blue, and Forever Amber. 

Most of all, I adored the tea roses—their thick stems punctuated by large thorns and leaves that grew in patterns of five, with the stems ending in large graceful blooms of circling petals.   The names for these sophisticated blooms were grandiose—Double Delight, Mister Lincoln, Chantilly Cream, Love Song, and Oympiad.

Arbors held the climbing roses like the orange Top of the World, the pink Pearly Gates, and the lavender Long Song varieties.  Shrub roses and tree roses filled in every nook and cranny so that the whole garden produced a cacophony of colors for our eyes.

Together, we read the names of as many varieties as we could, pausing at the ones that were the most fragrant or dazzling.  I nestled my nose into the blooms as deep as I dared, trying to memorize the smells forever.  Never before had I been in the midst of such splendor, unrivaled beauty, and mesmerizing fragrances.

According to Mother, each color of rose had its own meaning and the number of roses given has a significance as well.  Yellow roses are for friendship and red roses show love.  Six roses means a growing affection and a dozen roses demonstrates complete love. 

The Berkeley Rose Garden also possessed an incomparable backdrop for our mother-daughter conversation.  As we walked together between the rows, we wondered at the vast view of the San Francisco Bay where the Golden Gate Bridge spread across the Bay’s exit like the arms of a graceful goddess.  The water changed from denim to indigo to periwinkle to cerulean to navy to slate depending on how the surrounding hills cast their shadows, the currents massaged its surface, and the sun penetrated into the prisms of the ocean’s molecules. 

Back at home, around the perimeter of my mother’s Sacramento patio grew dozens of camellia bushes under the shade of a giant mulberry tree.  From November to April, these glossy green overgrown bushes produced hundreds of curly, pink blossoms.  Mother told her children that camellias mean “young sons and daughters,” which seemed so fitting for my mother’s house since she had ten children who were easily outnumbered by the profusions of camellias in her garden.

When my mother moved into an assisted living apartment, she made sure that she had a vase in her cupboard for flowers.  This vase was about 8 inches high and made out of white milk glass; any type of flower would look beautiful in it.   

She had developed macular degeneration in both eyes, so she couldn’t read or, sometimes, even find the food on her dinner plate; she could, however, always sense when you held a bouquet of flowers in your hands to give her.  A smile that matched the petals of a pink rose would light up her face as she took them from you. 

She asked you to put them in her vase or find a place for them on her desk or window sill.  Every few days, she called and told you how they looked or smelled, or how many blooms were still perky or drooping, until one day, she called and told you that she was cleaning out the vase.  I gave her lilies at Easter, red roses during the summer, chrysanthemums during the fall, and a poinsettia at Christmastime.  Her favorite were always the roses because, after all, she was named after them.

I ordered the flowers for my mother’s casket when she died.  The funeral representative recommended a spray of red roses and red carnations, but I knew better.  Never would I allow carnations to come near my dear mom.  I ordered the largest spray of red roses I could because I knew that nothing less would make her happier.

The officiate at the gravesite told us that red roses were such an appropriate choice.  “Red roses symbolize eternal love,” he said.  We placed our spray of eternal love over her gravesite after the service, and their blooms thrived for weeks in the chilly California air of December and January. 

Two months later, my husband bought me a dozen deep red roses for Valentine’s Day.  I carefully extracted them, one by one, from the brown wrapping paper, snipped each stem with a pair of sharp pruning scissors by about one inch, and arranged them in a tall, clear crystal vase filled with fresh water and rose food.  Then, I ceremoniously placed the vase of love on the coffee table in the living room—a place visible from most places in our house during the day. 

One day, as he sat in an arm chair in front of these red roses, he told me how wonderful he felt looking at their beauty.  “I’ve never thought about how beautiful flowers looked before,” he said, with joy filling his eyes.  “I want to sit here forever.”

I realized then, that my mother’s appreciation of flowers was so strong that its influence had passed from her to me, and through me, to my husband.  My love for flowers also positively influences my son, my daughter, my friends, and even people I don’t know with the optimistic power of beauty. 

My mother—my Rosie knew that the delicate blooms of flowers—so ethereal in their form and beauty—are most extraordinary at communicating the powerful, yet intangible nature of love.