As the first post on this new blog, I thought I would show you the first serious attempt in my Artsy Project. I have decided, at least until I get bored with the subject, to concentrate on the beauty of flowers. I am going to try to avoid all the complicated stuff about flowers and just focus on their beauty, and maybe their generic names. Until now, I couldn’t tell you my favorite flowers, as I didn’t know their names.

I do have a couple of garden books that I bought from ThriftBooks. One is about how to photograph them to bring out their beauty. The other is an Encyclopedia of Flowers. That, along with the National Geographic book on Wildflowers of North America Field Guide should be all I need.

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Now, a little story about how I grew to love the beauty of flowers:

I was about 7-years-old when I first had my own garden. It was an 8 x 8 ft patch of ground that Dad spaded up for me. I think my first crop was radishes, and since Dad loved green onions, they were included. That was the first of many gardens I have had in my life.

The largest garden was when we rented an old farmhouse when I started high school in 1961. Our landlord farmed about 300 acres in the area, and in the Spring he plowed and tilled up a 25 x 60 ft garden for me. A large part of the garden was potatoes and corn, as that is what we primarily ate in those lean years.

I didn’t have a garden during my college years and the subsequent years when I was rented apartments, but when after getting married in 1986 and we bought our first house. I had the garden of my dreams. It was a fenced-in raised-bed garden as shown here.

All of my gardens were veggies. I never considered planting flowers. I was first seriously introduced to flower gardens in 1986 when my newly minted wife planted flowers around our condo. Those flowers are shown below. Every year of our 35-year marriage, she planted lavish flower beds.

Once again, I need to thank my wife for introducing me to something that is now dear to my heart. I look forward to the time I have left to photographing, sketching, and raising potted flowers in my RetCom apartment. This will be an eternal passion, as my perpetual job after that will be “pushing up daisies”. I will tell you much more about the last one in the coming weeks.