Seriously. She didn't bring flowers to my place. She got on a bus with a jar of flowers, then switched to a subway train, and then she met me at a restaurant and after that we went on to a coffeeshop and only as we were leaving that did she tell me that the jar of water with cut flowers in it, the jar we'd set down on both tables and admired as our personal portable centrepiece, was for me to bring home if I wanted it.
(I wanted it.)
The terrace outside our condo window is full of flowers, so I took the little jar out there to be with its friends.
It's a very humble jar, with just one or two of several different humble blooms like chamomile and Queen Anne's Lace and bachelor's buttons and snapdragons, and it looked incredibly charming on our coffeeshop table and lunch table. I was so smitten!
The plantings on the terrace take a different approach: sheer volume.
It was a super hot day when I took these pictures, and some flowers in a different bed were proving incredibly popular with honeybees.
You can't see them at this scale. Actually if you look closely, the purple blooms are blurry, too. That's because the plants were ALIVE with fuzzy black and yellow insects, shaking the flowers as they scrambled around looking for pollen. See?
This batch was even more busy.
In part because there was no need for me to sit at the little table that stands alongside these plantings, it made me very happy to see that our very urban rooftop garden is feeding so many bees. There's a real drive for this sort of thing downtown where concrete grows like grass, and I know it's effective because I never see this many bees in one place in the leafy neighbourhood where our house is.
Digression for colour:
While I was out that day I also bought some model cars. Don't ask. I was with a friend who wanted to stop at a very cute model store, and it had a Citroen DS and I never ever pass up the chance to buy one of those because they aren't all that common.
This is my fourth, and it's a totally different scale from the other three, and I had to have it.
Then I saw this perfect boxy white car and thought - MAN, this would look so nice as a little surprise accent in the living room of the new house.
And who's gonna pass up something red? Not me!
I'm not quite as crazy as I sound. They were all in the sale bin.
But back to the flowers:
Cut flowers are not something I do on my own. In theory they are so beautiful, but in practise you have to find a vase and snip the ends on an angle and set them into water in the aforementioned vase and then remember to keep changing the water and taking out the no-longer-pretty flowers as they start to die. And in practise, I am totally lazy about anything like that, but these guys? These guys came pre-vase'd! And there aren't very many stems, so they are really easy to stay on top of for snipping and water-changing. Plus, I am super attached and I am happy to care for them.
I truly love my jar of flowers. I had an amazing life insight looking at them the other day, and when I went to write it down to share with you, I realized it was gone again, but maybe that doesn't matter. Cut flowers in a jar are just awesome all on their own.
(and so are model cars!)
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