As a vegetable gardener I am frequently green (thank you I’ll be here all night) with envy.
The flower gardener bloggers get to post and write about pretty stuff. Just look at those sites! Man even my house smells better when I visit them! Beautiful pictures everyday. Flowers that I’ve never heard of (which actually is most flowers), flowers that look alien, flowers that look biologically human. Posts and pictures of bees, birds, stamens, pistils, petals, pollen, phototropism.
What do I get to write about? Mostly ugly stuff that you can eat. Now I know that you can eat many flowers (squash blossoms!) like nasturtiums, roses (especially the thorns), peanut butter, and the reclusive filet mignon flower, but really when we think about eating plants it’s pretty much vegetables.
But still.
Behold! These flower things! Look at the purple! And the other colors and the stuff that makes it flowery! And I grew this myself!
Sort of. We inherited this.. clematis I think. And since I don’t know what I’m doing with flowers, well I just yanked all the dead vines away last year. Thought I killed it by mistake. But, naturally, my well-honed plant instincts were dead on. Years of just yanking plants out of the dirt and snipping away twiggy looking crap turned out to be just the kind of education I needed for this particular kind of clematis – whatever kind that is.
It is spectacular. So many flowers. The thing looks pillowy, like I could lay down on it and settle softly into my own custom flowery memory foam (and my dainty figure would barely leave an indent).
It makes me appreciate nature even more.
Soon, I will eat it.
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yep, Clematis it is, and a pretty one. I’ve been trying to find a place in my yard that one will grow in for the past 6 years…sigh
Nancy – I wll send you this chunk of my yard, its mixture of sun and shade and the soil which is wholly untended!
It is very pretty. Oddly, where we are on vacation right now has a big flower garden. On a trellis is a clematis. It’s a bit more sickly looking.. not fluffy like the one in my yard.
Ha!!! Bring on the filet mignon flower. And a fried chicken flower, too, while you’re at it…
Oooh…. A fried chicken flower. I would plant that all over my yard. Everywhere I possibly could.
A friend of mine told me that her mom used to cook pumpkin flowers in her skillet all of the time. I am really getting into the gardening thing, and I love watching things grow and eating the yummy results. I’m still not quite there, though, that I can picture eating the flowers. I will try. Sometime.
By the way, thanks for the comments! I think those big brown bug with the big pincers looks worse than it is. I need to be less sqeamish and just grab the Japanese beetles and smoosh them, though, don’t I?
Today I tried to get my kids interested in the newly growing veggies in the garden. “Look, a zucchini! A pea pod! A green bean!” They were unimpressed. I’ll bet if I had a pizza flower they’d be all over it.
Gorgeous clematis!!
Thanks Amy! It’s probably gorgeous because I had almost nothing to do with it!
Graceunbound, Pizza flower is perfect. Between a fried chicken flower and a pizza flower, I think we’re covered.
Gardenmama, pumpkin flowers are great! And stuffed squash blossoms are perfect too. Definitely, squish those japanese beetles! THey are very crunchy and clingy… so if you don’t like the squishy, plop them all into a cup of water and then nuke them or something. They a prolific reproducers… lots to kill.
There is no flower currently blooming in my garden more beautiful than the purple cauliflower. Did someone say “pizza flower”?
–Curmudgeon
Oooohhhhh… the purple cauliflower…..
I’ve got a bean flower post ready to go. That’s pretty too. And you can eat the hell out of beans. Cauliflower too. No cauliflower in my garden this year and I’m sad…..
It is gorgeous. I’m guessing it is a Jackmanii clematis, and yes, you cut it back to the ground after the frost, and it blooms yearly on new growth. I have one too, and similarly, I thought I’d killed mine, too, so I did some research! It like to have its “feet in the shade,” or a good cover of mulch for best flower production.
Thank you henbogle for the id…. This year I cut it all back very early in the spring. This year, I’ll do the right thing and cut off all the dead twiggy bits late in the autumn. It really is gorgeous and it’s the first thing I see as I pull in to our driveway. Makes me want to figure out this flower thing……