MY LOVE AFFAIR WITH FLOWERS
by Molly

I love Flowers. Have you noticed? My lifelong adventures with Flowers began with sludgy brews of Goldenrod tea. The invited guests, my dolls Heidi and Wendy, were polite. They drank their tea without complaint. Later, I branched out and offered my wild foods concoctions to a more particular group of diners; my parents and siblings. If the skunk cabbage pancakes had tasted better, this book might not be in your hands. But the pancakes were really bad. No one would eat them. My family did not like the sautéed cattail tubers or wild chokecherry jam either.  At age ten, I abandoned a career as a wild foods chef and looked to the Flowers for different ways to share their glory with the world.

The Flowers and I never looked back. As a young girl, I painted a watercolor book of Adirondack wildflowers. I started seedlings on the windowsills and planted Flowers at the edges of my family’s vegetable garden. I entered Flowers in the local grange fair and wondered at the mysteries of ribbon allocation. Mostly, I visited with every Flower I met in field, parking lot, or garden landscape. No one suffered any digestive woes. 

I created my first Flower garden in my early twenties. I dug a small plot outside the boy’s dormitory where I lived as a dorm parent. Keeping the Flowers safe from errant Frisbees was a full time job. How happy I was when, in 1987, my husband and I moved with our small children to the hilltop that would become Green Hope Farm. It was bliss to garden to my heart’s content without incoming lacrosse balls.  

Angels as well as Flowers have been my constant companions since my Goldenrod tea days. But when an Angel whispered in my ear that Flowers and something called Flower Essences were central to my spiritual work in the world, I was surprised. Could my spiritual purpose really be that fun? My life purpose was in the GARDEN with the FLOWERS? I could imagine no happier calling.