apartment therapy changing the world, one room at a time

My maternal grandparents always kept pansies in a particular flower bed when I was very little, and it was so fun to be given full license to pick enough of them to fill the top surface of the sky blue bakelite shallow cereal bowl that they would float in.

Apparently, with pansies, picking them just encourages them to bloom even more.

I'm kind of curious whether this "child poet" was writing this when she was a child, or whether she was writing poems for a children's book target market. It doesn't say what date she wrote that, just her birth and death dates. Anyway ... it's a sweet poem.

Sorry. OK, I just clicked on the link about her. That's very interesting, but it's kind of a sad thing that her mother didn't push her out of that little literary nest earlier, so she would actually write them down herself.

That's a nice memory Curtis.
Flowers have a lot of childhood associations for me I think mostly because my mom is a gardener and finds so much joy in plants and I absorbed that.
I love the very faint, sweet smell of a large bed of pansies.

count me in . . .
we had a ring of pansies around an oak tree in our front yard when I was very small. i loved their faces, more than roses, or anything else in the yard. plus you could pet them! soft and sturdy flowers. they do grow more when you pinch them back, so you can set the children on them...

we moved from there when I was five but the imprint is so clear
happy sweetness!

Okay, me, too. I used to visit my grandparents when I was little, and my grandfather let me plant pansies in a patch in their garden. That was the first flower I had a personal connection to, and it's lasted to this day.

The other day, P2 posted a comment about how one has to be completely inured to NYC to not notice that there is something wrong with a teeny, viewless studio going for an exhorbitant amount of money.

That is my feeling concerning these flower boxes. They're at least a small respite from the monochromatic concrete and steel of the city, but there is something terribly wrong with us when we think that even a small flowerbox (lovely though it may be) seems adequate.

I tried to get my neighbors involved in a gardening effort on my street--plants, trees (especially evergreens and ivy), but no one was willing to go for it. What a pity!

But the concrete and steel isn't monochromatic--it's as full of variation as a single species of flower. The other day I saw a sign posted in Chinatown: Doing a Project on What Surprises People. Call xxx-xxxx and tell me what surprised you today. Sadly, I think I ran the phone number through the wash, but it was a great reminder that everyday something surprises me here. Today it was seeing how many associations people have with pansies. I'd never much cared for them, but I do now. The thing that really got to me about Hilda Conklin is that as soon as her mom stopped taking the dictation, she stopped writing. Even the child genius couldn't handle the blank page.

Pansies and nasturtiums always make me think of my maternal grandmother. One of my great memories is of going to visit her as a child, and exploring. She lived across from the ocean, but there was a sort of meadow leading down to the beach that also turned into a wooded area further up. My sister and once found an abandoned garden in the woods. No house, no explanation--just a planned flower garden that was semi-overgrown. I still wonder where it came from.