Writing
Essays and observations from the garden — the seasons, the surprises, and the quiet lessons that only dirt and patience can teach.
"The garden doesn't care about your plans. It has its own."
— Suellen Barnes
Essays & Observations
There is something about a ten-foot sunflower that makes people slow down. One summer we planted nearly 1,800 Mammoth Grey Stripe sunflowers in a small patch in our meadow so that customers could see the blooms as they drove down the farm lane. By August we had a wall of gold that stopped cars in both directions. Here is everything I know about growing the big ones.
We use all-natural practices to raise our cut flowers at Barnesdale Farm — no pesticides, no shortcuts. When the bees found our zinnias, they came in numbers we had never seen before. Here is what we have learned about growing cut flowers naturally and why it makes a difference for the pollinators that depend on them.
A monarch does not land just anywhere. It is looking for something specific — a particular color, a particular scent, a particular kind of welcome. After years of watching them work their way through our cosmos patch, I have learned what it takes to make your garden a place they return to.
I love all my flowers — but I especially love my dahlias, and as it turns out, so do my customers. Sometimes, though, my customers' and my favorites differ, and so learning to grow for the full range of what people love, while staying true to what I love, has been one of the most interesting parts of running a cut flower farm.
Some plants overpromise. The Prince of Orange dahlia is not one of them. Every year it comes back with the same saturated, almost unreal orange that stops you mid-row. It is the flower I point to when someone asks me where to start with dahlias.
A dahlia at seven in the morning is not the same dahlia at seven in the evening. The light changes everything — the color, the mood, the way a flower seems to lean into or pull away from the world. I have come to believe that paying attention to those shifts is one of the quietest, most reliable things a garden can do for your mental health.
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The garden writes its own calendar. These essays follow it — season by season, year by year, always finding something new to say about the same patch of earth.