valentines....

...day, February 14. I expect to put in a long day at work. Selling dozens and dozens and dozens of dozen roses, both as cash-and-carry bouquets for $19.99, and in vases with a bit of fluff and greenery, for $34.99. Plus a variety of mixed flower bouquets and innumerable plants in pots.

Valentine's Day was my grandmother's birthday. She loved to plant and watch things grow, but she lived in the era when 'well-bred' women did not actually do any planting, instead supervising the yard man who would come and do her bidding. Hyacinths fragrantly blooming in the early spring, dozens of tiny blossoms on upright stalks in pink, white and lavender are beginning to peep out of the cold damp earth and make me think of my grandmother. The man who came to do her dirty work planted the bulbs in the fall, and covered them with pine straw mulch, tending them until the green sword-shaped leaves and narrow stalks filled with buds began to come up and show their colors. After the blooms faded, he dug each bulb and put them in bags, let them rest, and stored them over the summer. The cycle started again each fall, with the bulbs going back into the ground, nestled in the dark, cold earth awaiting the changing seasons.

She also loved camellias. Not my favorite, but she had a number of huge camellia bushes growing in the yard, and would clip the blooms to decorate in her house in the cold winter months when all else was drab and dull.  She would air-layer sections of the branches, to get new plants from the mother and share with people who admired her colorfully blooming plants. I know some of the children of those plants are still around, thriving in landscapes in south Georgia, all started from the mother bush owned by my grandmother.

So, maybe my love of  'hole-digging' as a form of therapy came from her? Or my dad, who passed it along, as he did enjoy gardening both ornamentals and vegetables in his back yard when he had time to putter around.