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Geraniums are one of the most reliable plants grown in the home garden. They can be obtained in flower in late spring and will add color to the garden until frost ... The new cultivars offer almost shatter-proof flowers that withstand wind and rain Growing Geraniums, Horticulture and Crop Science
Mr. Spicer is usually on the road. Mrs. Spicer tries to maintain some beauty in her life by growing geraniums in the desert... She tells Mary that the land has broken her--she is "past caring." At the end she dies in her bed. The last thing she tells her daughter to do is to water the geraniums. from Literature Annotations Henry Lawson, 'Water Them Geraniums'
Mr. Spicer is usually on the road. Mrs. Spicer tries to maintain some beauty in her life by growing geraniums in the desert... She tells Mary that the land has broken her--she is "past caring." At the end she dies in her bed. The last thing she tells her daughter to do is to water the geraniums. from Literature Annotations Henry Lawson, 'Water Them Geraniums'
And the Theme for Today is ...
Back in the earlier days of 'the net' as we all called it then, I made a couple of Californian cyber friends. They ended up getting married to each other, and I ended up visiting them in their California bungalow in Pasadena.They were so West Coast. I stayed a week and never saw meat or alcohol the whole time. Life was wholesome and focussed. And very child-centered. They had two.
The centerpiece of the house was a complete Oxford English dictionary, set on a stand with a gold-embossed leather bookmark. For easy reference. This was an educational house.
In the mornings we'd all wake early. Well you have to wake early when you've gone to bed at nine, the night before. We'd all assemble in the dining room, and the father of the house would announce,
I'd be transfixed. I can't remember all the themes but I remembered the first breakfast when D announced, "The Theme for today is WATER". And so it was.
Although the youngest child was only a few months old, she stared dutifully as her NASA dad demonstrated the role of water in our breakfast, our lives and the planet.
So what has this got to do with the price of fish - well I'll tell you ...
Brought about no doubt by the fact that yesterday I received two sets of flowers. The first arrived by delivery, sent by a faraway friend. You can see them above. The second, yellow tulips, arrived with a good friend who came for dinner. You can see them on the left.The first flowers that I can remember were geraniums. The sad geraniums in Henry Lawson's short story "Water Them Geraniums", about a women in the Australian outback in the 1800's. These flowers were the only colour in her harsh and isolated life.
My first flowers were 'delivered'. I realised later that they probably came from my expat dad, who would have ordered them from his home in New Zealand by Interflora.
I was eleven and standing on the footpath in Elsternwick on a gloomy Melbourne day, when they arrived. It was my birthday. I took them from the delivery man and was aghast. My pre-adolescent mind immediately sensed danger. They could only have come from a boy. I immediately shoved them in the garbage bin, told no one, and pretended that the last ten minutes had never happened.
My next flower event occurred about seven years later. I'd grown up. And so had the world. It was the time of Flower Power, and we dreamed of travelling to San Francisco and wearing flowers in our hair.
My young brother brought a girl home. She looked sort of lost, but what I really remember about her was her gumboots, in which she'd arranged about twenty stems of daffodils. Tim had 'found' her wandering along Swanston Street ('Melbourne's 'Downtown'). I'm not sure if she'd developed the gift of speech. But she smiled a lot.
Since then I can almost charter my life through flowers.
I once owned a house where I made an almost magical flower garden. And now in New York I still insist on some sort of flower garden
But flowers for me are no longer associated solely with birthdays and seventies flower power.Flowers can show themselves on sad and despairing occasions.
I remember the last days of my mother, and a jam jar of straggly garden flowers near her bedside, picked by a grandchild.
The flowers commemorating those who died on 9/11.
And the flowers in Strawberry field on the death of George Harrison. | But now I prefer to remember other happier flowers, such as the flowers of Copenhagen. |
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And the most beautiful flowers of the world, the flowers of Australia. Till next time, Kate Juliff New York February 2006 |
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