The adorable little restaurant where Neal and I had our wedding reception brunch had a fabulous garden with meandering paths out back. Sadly, the place closed a year or so after our wedding. We bought all sorts of vintage plates, platters, glasses, and pitchers when it closed, and Neal surprised me with a dozen plates the owner had bought for our party. I love that we use so many pretty items from what used to be our favorite place.
When final closeout sales were happening, Neal asked the owner if we could buy some of the plants from her garden for our yard. Like most gardeners, she insisted that we take what we liked. We didn’t want to abuse her generosity, but this was the plant we had our eyes on. It blooms each year right around our anniversary (which is next Wednesday). I enjoy looking out the window and seeing it. Even more, I like having little bits of a place that meant a lot to us at our home now.
Do you have any sentimental plants in your home or garden? Tell me about them, will you?
I do! I have beautiful iris and primrose that came from my grandmother’s yarn. She passed many years ago and the house has since been sold. The iris are in bloom now and I love that they remind me of her.
Bee-u-ti-FUL!!!
Oh that is a lovely lovely plant in bloom! We have a Rose of Sharon bush that began as a lowly twig in our yard years ago. It was a shoot from Fireman’s mom’s tree. We treasure it now. It has sent many shoots up too that we have given to other family members. It is so nice to have blooms in August on a bush in Chicago. It loves wet feet.
We must have typed our comments at the same time and we both do the same thing with our beloved plants!
P.S. I do have a very sentimental plant – it’s a schefflera my mom sent me on the day I was first sworn in as an attorney. It was 1996 and I was in Boston. When I got back from the ceremony (in Fanuel Hall even!!) it was waiting for me in my office. When I moved from my the firm’s office in Boston to their office in Menlo Park, I was putting my things in storage while I looked for a place to live and knew the plant had to stay.
Somewhat sadly, I told my secretary the plant was hers. When I arrived at my new Cali office, the schefflera was sitting on my desk (it was huge though!). My secretary in Boston and the guys in the mailroom packed that plant in a box full of packing peanuts and overnighted it to California! Not a single stem broke in the process.
When I moved from California to Nashville, the reason I drove cross country rather than shipping my car was just so I could bring that plant with me!
That plant has yielded so many offspring because any time I prune, I root the cuttings and whammo – baby plants. They are all over the house and anytime I need a hostess gift or any other kind of gift, whenever it’s appropriate, I give people those plants.
Joy…
I have maybe 20-30 different varieties if hosta in my garden. I know the names of many of them, some are a mystery. Many I bought, some transplanted from previous homes, many given to me from family and friends. I love them all! My favorites are the nameless ones given to me from my Aunt Betty. She dug them up for me several years ago right before she sold her cottage in Indiana. They came back to Connecticut in the back of my car and quickly planted. They are a big showy, dark green, bumpy leaved plant with beautiful fragrant white flowers.
That’s a beautiful photo and a lovely story. I do have sentimental plants and I was just talking with my sister-in-law about this last weekend. She came over to help me do some rearranging and thinning in my perennial bed and I had stories about the ground phlox my mom bought me on my first Mother’s Day, and the peony bush Hannah’s dad bought me on my 2nd Mother’s Day, and the heirloom and ancient daylilies I stole from my neighbor’s garden before they bulldozed her house after she died. I love to attach stories to plants!
We’ve always lived in a condo with little growing space. I’ve tried, and failed over and over, to grow anything in the bit of land we have. The only plant that has grown is sweet woodruff. It’s a ground cover and it starts coming through the ground early in the spring. You can smell its color, I swear, as it has that green, healthy, springy scent right away and when the tiny white flowers bloom you can smell them, too. If you care to harvest the flowers have a pepper taste and can be a nice garnish to a salad. I’m very attached to my woodruff garden.
Forget me nots and lambs ear are two things that remind me of my childhood. I love them and plant them and care for them even though they don’t like to grow in the desert.
We only have a balcony, so the yearly plants are geraniums. But I love and think about the lilac bushes of my youth – and the hours spent playing in ‘houses’ in the bushes. We used to plant impatiens and marigolds when I was a kid, and there was a year when I was allowed to buy wildflower seeds and sprinkle them to see what would grow.