Journey as a Flower Gardener

I love growing flowers in my backyard. I can’t grow anything but an ivy inside, but my outside flower gardens are usually gorgeous. I have learned alot in the past 15 years. But I can remember moving into our first rental house and looking at the two exisiting beds and feeling very overwhelmed. I had no idea where to even start. My journey as a flower gardener started back when I was just a kid.

Journey as a Flower Gardener

As a child we had huge zinnia and marigold beds. My Mom was the queen of taking simple zinnia and marigold seeds and turning our backyard into a garden of color. One year she even designed a secret garden path in the middle of our huge vegetable garden. All summer long we would get to go out and cut a fresh bouquet of zinnias for our supper table. I still can’t grow zinnias like she did! They were gorgeous.

When the flowers would die in the fall, we would collect the seeds and save rows and rows of jars full of seeds ready for the next year!

As a teenager I visited a friends house. They had a back field full of daffodils – literally a field of cheery yellow blooms. That’s when I fell in love with daffodils and decided that someday I would have hundreds growing in my own yard each spring.

Once I got married and moved into our first rental home, I realized that though I loved flowers I was clueless as to how to actually decide what to plant and grow. I started asking my Grandma, Mom, Mother in law and friends. I started learning about irises, hostas, lilies, and more. I was given starts of flowers, bushes and grasses. Sometimes the seeds and starts grew beautifully and sometimes the experiments failed. But I kept learning.

Now I have a large yard with many garden beds. I have many different flowers. My goal has been to have something in bloom from last frost to first freeze. This is the 2nd year I’ve accomplished that goal. It is so fun to share the color and beauty with those that visit.

You can take a little walk around my flower gardens in my Flower Journal 2012.

Do you love your flowers? When did you fall in love with flowers? What’s your favorite? I’d love to hear!

Over the past year, I’ve written many times about the flowers in my yard. Here’s some of the articles in case you missed them.