The Flowers of May

Along with getting my garden on its feet (that's an odd idiom), I have succeeded in painting a little the past week. I get so torn this time of year. Garden? Paint? Garden? Paint? Some of the spring flowers are so fleeting that they need to be painted or else I have to wait for next year. But my garden can run away on me (those feet again) if I don't get it under control at the beginning of the season.

Our back lawn is covered with wood violets right now. They are so pretty and I much prefer them to the dandelions which are also vying for my attention right now. I dug out a little clump of the violets and potted them so I would have to time to paint them. I am not a quick painter. I never have been. Too detail-oriented for that I guess. Below is my painting in progress and at the very top is my finished wood violet study on Twinrocker hot-pressed watercolor paper.

The paper wasn't completely flat when I finished the painting so I placed it under a pile of big art books. I really didn't pay attention to them at the time. They were serving a utilitarian rather than literary purpose. It was only when I retrieved my painting afterwards that I noticed the top book "The Flowers of May" with a watercolour painting of violets on its cover! I had distractedly chosen the perfect paperweight!

While it would be easy to assume that "The Flowers of May" is a celebration of this month's flowers, it actually pays tribute to a wonderful botanical artist named Caroline May who lived from 1809 until 1874. She painted delicate, beautiful watercolours of British wildflowers. About a thousand paintings of her paintings have survived. This book contains reproductions of ninety of them. I hadn't looked inside this book in years.  Look at Caroline May's painting of wood violets that she refers to as 'Dog's Violet'. Isn't it lovely? I'm so glad I saw it after and not before I had completed my own painting. It was a beautiful moment of serendipity in my week.

Within the same lovely purple palette, my lilacs (Syringa vulgaris) are in full bloom right now. I adore their fragrance and can't resist burying my nose in them each time I pass. You do have to be careful though. Yesterday my nose came very close to a giant bumble bee!

I am very fond of purple, especially blue-purple. My favourite colour is periwinkle (which is somewhere in between purple and blue). The lilac blooms have wonderful combinations of purple, blue and hints of pink. It's just amazing the gradation of colour in each little blossom. With their scent and colour, they are pretty close to a perfect flower for me.

I picked a small lilac sprig to paint. I actually had to pick more than one over the course of finishing my painting as lilacs wilt very quickly.

Here is my lilac sprig painting also painted on Twinrocker paper. The lilac in the photo is not the one I used as my reference for my painting but it's very similar. Wouldn't it be nice if there was a 'click and sniff' button so I could share their sweet, heady fragrance with you? ♥

A Morning Walk Around My Garden

This morning was cold but beautiful. Six degrees Celsius (just under 43 Fahrenheit) at 7:00 a.m.  Brrrrrr. The chill was a reminder to cherish these last weeks of the growing season. Here are a few photos from this morning's walk around my garden.

The scene above is one of my favourite parts of my garden at the moment.  It reminds me of 'something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue'.  I planted some of the annuals this summer (the blue salvia, petunias and alyssum).  Others have grown back from seed deposited last year (the snapdragons, the coral salvia and the big vine in the background--spanish flag).  The lovely, lonely sunflower to the right was a gift from a bird.

Salvia is without a doubt one of my favourite annuals. It is both elegant and hardy. It will still look beautiful right until the end of October in my Zone 5 garden. Coral salvia (salvia coccinea 'coral nymph') is particularly stunning. I occasionally find the coral plants in garden centres here in the spring or you can order the seed online. This particular plant popped up from seed deposited in the flowerbed last year. Lucky me. I find white salvia (salvia farinacea) to be very useful in the garden. I often use it in my front yard flowerbeds as it combines beautifully with any colour. Another beautiful benefit of salvia is that hummingbirds love it.

And the final image I leave you from my walk around the garden this morning is this sweet little viola. It is so rare to find blue tones in flowers. This beauty is what I would call periwinkle or lavender-blue which happens to be my favourite colour.

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Just a brief postscript. As I've been writing my post this morning, the radio has been reminding me that this is the 10th anniversary of 9/11. My husband was scheduled to fly to New York for a business meeting on the 12th (in the financial district but not the towers), so missed being there by a day. We were lucky. I remember how very important my garden was to me in those unsettled days after that terrible event. A garden can be a source of solace, restoration and hope on the darkest days. I planted more spring bulbs that fall than I had in a very long time. Those bulbs provided work for my hands and hope for my heart. My thoughts go out to all touched by that horrendous event ten years ago today.

"The man who has planted a garden feels that he has done something for the good of the world."

Vita Sackville-West