Blessing #21 - My Flowers

     Oh, how I love the flowers in our yard.  They are all so beautiful and colorful. Whether they are large or small I don’t care...just so they bloom. I love watering them, weeding them, and photographing them. My husband has a little “Harry Potter” room in the stairwell under the steps going up to the second floor where we have installed grow lights on a timer, and that is where he starts my plants from seed each year.  It is such fun watching them sprout and then start to grow up towards the light until it is time to move them outside into the yard.  Some years we get a special surprise when some pop up as freebies having made it over from last year.  That is really a neat.  The flowers here in VA are different from the ones I knew as a child growing up in South Florida, but that makes it even more exciting. Each year I learn something new.  

     My husband is a hiker, all of the children and grandchildren have been brought up around the mountains and the woods, and one of our closest friends is very knowledgeable on plants, trees, and flowers.  On many Saturdays and Sundays we go hiking up into the mountains to enjoy the majestic views and to identify and photograph the little orchids as they are popping from the ground, the blood root, trout lilies, azaleas, mountain laurel and rhododendron to name a few. Those weekend walks are heavenly..though some of them turn into “Forced Marches” for me.  The hills seem to keep getting steeper each year, but I’m not going to let that stop me.  The guys give me a hard time, so I just grin and keep on hoofing it along with them. 

     Flowers and their beauty have added much to our lives.  We nurture and treasure them.  They are Blessing #22.

“What a desolate place would be a world without a flower! It would be a face without a smile, a feast without a welcome. Are not flowers the stars of the earth, and are not the stars the flowers of heaven.”

~A.J. Balfour