Valentine Yard Flowers

I was fortunate enough to receive my favorite kind of Valentine flowers – the kind I arrange myself. Florists do a good job in our town, but I enjoy doing the arrangements myself. I am like most of the southern women I know – our creativity comes out in the bouquets we create. We go out in our yards and pick some of our own plants and greenery to add to the mix.
This time of year the pickings in our yard are wonderful. February is the month of the flowering bushes and first of the bulb flowers. All old house places and many of our roadsides have daffodils, snow drops and fragrant narcissuses popping up in shades of yellow and white. The forsythia yellow bells, the orangey pink of quince, and the delicate white traceries of bridal wreath are perfect for adding to the Wal-Mart flowers that our gentlemen callers purchase for us.
In my own yard, I grow all of the above, plus some variegated shrubs that spark up bouquets. I get so much satisfaction from going out to pick what I have, then putting it into bouquets with my gift flowers. I made three big bouquets out of my gleanings. I didn’t even add camellias although I love them. They are so beautiful, but are somewhat prima donnas in that they shine best alone. I did see a really nice bouquet that included them when I visited Susie McGowan recently. She had done one of our yard-plus arrangements that I thought was so pretty I snapped a picture of it. Hers included antique purple dawn camellias. They seemed to get along quite nicely with the other flowers in her bouquet. Sometime I catch mine between frosts and add them into bouquets of greenery and red berries at Christmas. I had a white bush called Alba Plena which means plenty whites (actually, it means many white), but it produces abundant flowers all winter long.
If I had written Steel Magnolias it would have been Steel Camellias because they really are tough. I think of them as like southern women, they look so delicate, but are really so tough.
In just a few weeks, our pilgrimage season starts in the Black Belt of Alabama. There are a multitude of antebellum homes in the area. Many of them were kept as family homes out of necessity long enough for people to begin to appreciate them.
I spent the night with my friend Garland in Camden recently in her old family home that she had bought from the other heirs. It was lovingly and unpretentiously restored. I say unpretentiously because the floors still has the durable brown enamel that everybody put on their old house floors to keep them polished looking when servants to do the work became a rarity or when they had enough children to do serious damage to the finish. Another unpretentious thing about the house is that she left one wall in the kitchen a brinel mixture of paints. This was over the objections of her husband who favored painting the whole thing white. They compromised with the one wall being left the odd, but charming mixture of yellow, green and bare wall. For those of you not from here, brinel is a word used to describe a dog that is not a single color, but an odd mixture that looks like it was painted by an impressionist artist in muddy colors.
I’m including a number of my yard flowers still life shots for your perusal.
I hope you enjoy them as much as I did putting them together. Now I need to have a party to show them off. My living room smells great right now, mostly because of the kiss-me-at-the-gate I picked over my neighbor’s garden fence. We have this help yourself agreement. She gets camellias if she wants them and I get whatever sticks over the fence. That’s how we do things in rural southwest Alabama.