More Rain, Rain, Rain--and Reading

When you can't garden, you might as well read about gardens. I've recently finished reading and enjoying The Paper Garden by Molly Peacock.

It brings together my interest in flowers, gardening, and botanical illustration.  Mary Delaney was a woman who started to make paper collages of flowers from paper that she painted with watercolors and cut out with scissors to make intricate and accurate images of flowers--at the age of 72!  Another inspiration for those of us who are retired from one life and are beginning another era in our life.  I saw an exhibit last year of Mary Delaney's actual work at the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven.  The author of the book did not see this exhibit, so I feel very fortunate to have seen the 30 collages and the embroidery that inspired it.  I hope that the watercolor lessons, the pastel lessons, the botanical illustration lessons, and my love of plants and gardens will inspire me in my seventies.

I am almost half way through reading the book Founding Gardeners by Andrea Wulf.



It's about the gardens George Washington developed at Mount Vernon, Thomas Jefferson designed and implemented at Monticello, and James Madison made at Montpelier.  John Adams' farm at Braintree was not quite the estates these Virginia gentlemen established, but his love of manure and the everyday work in the garden is inspiring also.  I was amazed to learn how thier gardens and their interest in gardening helped to establish our national identity.
More rain predicted for tomorrow, so I may be able to complete the reading of this book before I go back to my own garden to perform the essential everyday ministrations the rain has interrupted.