I love this old ceramic menu card, it’s fun to use and it’s something we no longer see a lot.
Early spring is all mud and rain. Mother Nature is waking up. It is a time of fresh beginnings, of things to come. Nature takes on that early, delicate green. Vegetables push their little noses up through the dirt. Daffodils, tulips, and forsythia color the landscape. The apple trees in my orchard bloom. I open all the windows and doors to let in the fresh air. The birds are busy building their nests. Soon baby animals are everywhere. It’s time to plant and prune. WARNING: When pruning, always know where your fingers are! If you don’t, you might not like where they end up.
Sweet baby peas, asparagus spears, spinach, and all kinds of lettuces come first. Delicate white flowers that smell so good produce the most delicious strawberries. Rhubarb also comes into season, and with strawberries make a pie that tastes like spring.
Spring flowers are my favorites. The scents of peonies and lilacs let you know that the earth is fully awake and summer is coming. I love peonies everywhere. And in June, the roses begin to blossom. Do your best to get roses that smell, they are much nicer!
I’ve always had a flower by my bed. My mother said it was good to wake up and go to sleep seeing something beautiful. I keep up the tradition in my room and for all my houseguests.
After winter, nature comes alive with color. I am including a list of spring flowers—trees, shrubs, annuals, and perennials—that you can plant or pick or buy to celebrate spring. I love to bring nature inside with flowers, leaves, branches, you name it. I also love a single, sweet flower in a small bottle. To me, it shows Mother Nature’s beauty in the simplest way.
The gate was my grandmother’s, Vivian Wessel, my mother’s mother. She had it at her house in Boston.
After a gray world of winter, I love to gather all the forsythia from my garden I can in one armload, bring it into the house, and drop it in a glass cylinder vase. It’s a herald of the hope and promise of spring—a burst of sunshine in the living room. Besides, anyone can cut branches, as long as you have a sturdy pair of clippers!
MARGOT SHAW
Editor, Flower magazine
Tulips on a spring table in an old polo trophy my father won.
Nelson guards the Sunchoke Chips.
