My Year-Long Garden

1856 Anne Pratt's 'Dog Rose'

Gardening is the art that uses flowers and plants as paint, and the soil and sky as canvas.

― Elizabeth Murray

I'm not a very good gardener. There have always been lots of excuses ~ the sun and my very fair Irish skin, little ones to care for, business to attend. Very legitimate excuses, but if I really wanted to make a go of the Garden, I'd've worked my way around them.

But. Although I'm not a very good gardener, I have a deep abiding love of the garden. Any garden, actually. One of my very most favorite places on this Earth is the Shaw's Garden, now formally known as the Missouri Botanical Gardens near Tower Grove Park in St. Louis. I can and have gotten lost there for hours. ...not for a long long time now, however, since the Jersey Shore has claimed me, but my memories are clear and lovely.

And so, today as it is raining, I'm thinking about a garden. I do better with 'framed' gardens ... and so I am enjoying my botanical engravings and chromolithographs, here ~

1954 Redouté's 'Rosa Foetida Herrm. Austrian Yellow Rose'

1896 Hoffmann Botanical Atlas, 'The Common Carrot'

1885 Flora von Deutschland, 'Gooseberry'

1882 Familiar Wildflowers, 'Corn Blue-Bottle'

1850 Tallis Scriptures Natural History For Youth, 'Onions and Garlic' 

1815 F.J. Bertuch's Bilderbuch, 'Frogbit'

1884 British Fungi chromolithograph, 'Parasol Mushroom'

1891 Our Country's Flowers, 'Poppies'

1911 Wildflowers Wonderful Ways, 'Teazel'

1853 Economic Botany, 'Hemp and Cotton'