Reclaiming Simple Garden Pleasures - Sunflowers, Roses, Hollyhocks and more

Krista Tippett, on her radio show blog, 'ON BEING', writes:

 " the transcendent food memory of my childhood remains the enormous, red, delicious tomatoes that were available at a ramshackle store on Main Street for a couple of months each summer. .... Dan Barber.... would have us ask this: Why did we abandon that pleasure, and how can we reclaim it as part of our ordinary food lives? "

I must follow this compelling question with one of my own about transcendent garden memories:

"Why did we abandon the simple pleasures of growing carrots in milk cartons, hollyhocks along old fences or lilacs at the corner of a house and how can we reclaim this as part of our ordinary waking life?"

milk carton gardening

Hollyhocks

Honeysuckle

We all have such memories - even city kids like me...

it might be the 'weed' that smelled like licorice ( anise hyssop), the buttercups that you put under your chin, the honeysuckle that you could suck a teeny drop of 'honey' from, the sweet smell of roses as you walked past a certain house, the bright yellow daffodils in early spring that sprang up overnight it seemed....

Dan Barber of Stone Barns ( a fabulous place near where I live) is on a mission to revive 'good food'...and I  guess I feel similarly about bringing flowers, plants and gardens back into our lives....this kind of knowledge has been cast aside in favor of math and physics but I say children can learn those disciplines better through understanding the phenomenal natural world around them.

So plant those sunflower seeds, install that Elephant Ear and cut up those milk cartons....transcendent garden memories await you.

Rainbow Knock Out Roses

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