Love your Top 10, Lisa! So hard to choose. Sweetpeas, roses and dahlias will always have my heart. Would add Snapdragon, Ammi, Daucus Dara, Ranunculus and Tulips to the list, if allowed 5 more. Your guide is a beautiful work of art! Thank you.
Love your 5 extra, Ammi is magic, I haven’t had huge success with it although I’m desperate to. And daucus is a permanent feature in my garden, aren’t they so perfectly floaty?
What a great idea! I think picking 10 favorites is a wonderful way to count all the reasons to celebrate some wonderful blossoms. (Then, pick an entirely new 10 favorites and do it again 🤣) You portraits are captivating.
Good luck with your Cosmos! I had them come up like weeds two years in a row, then nothing at all for two years, and I'm trying again right now. Gardening has to be one of the most forcibly-optimistic-or-you-may-as-well-just-give-up activities in the world :)
Haha well said! And we refuse to give up 😂 sadly my garden doesn’t love cosmos as much as I do, it either stagnates small or is huge with broom stick stems and min flowers. Too molly coddled maybe
They are such divas sometimes seriously, "You want more attention? That's too much attention? You were fine yesterday but today everything's wrong?" Ah well, hopefully stubbornness is key :)
Oh my gosh, I think I would agree with you on nearly all of these!
I love love love Icelandic poppies, but I feel like they have a temperamentalness (that's almost certainly not a word!) that gives me the fear, so in my commercial floristry work I don't use them that much. But as a flower I'd have in my house they'd definitely be in the top five.
I think I would boot out cosmos for delphinium. And maybe swap daffodils for narcissus. I'm almost certain I'm forgetting some favourites.
Loved reading your list! I hear you on the poppies, even in the ground they're temperamental. I'm still a starry-eyed fan. Delphinium is gorgeous, such structure! Perhaps I should've said narcissus as opposed to daffs, to include all my favourite small and dainty ones, cheerfulness! paperwhites!! I think I will edit that right now :D
Appreciate your diagram on spacing. Planted some beautiful multi colored amaranth -large - and want to be sure I am spacing them right. Bought from a gorgeous company in Canada. First time.
I love your whole list, all the flowers on it, the pictures you've chosen and the words but especially your description of the scent of stock - "their ability to invoke a creamy-vanilla-clove reverie in the middle of winter. I have always felt like they got shorted a bit on the name front, stock doesn't sound like something that would conjur up reverie but you're so right that it does.
My personal 10 (and I bet when im drifting off to sleep tonight I'm going to be revising this in my head) would be ... jasmine (the smell of jasmine at night makes me think of my best traveling moments) meadowsweet (smells like marzipan and great for mead making), rose, honeysuckle (on a warm evening, when I'm listening to birds. Or made into a syrup and then ice cream), sweet pea, bluebell, choisya (smells like honey but also insanely sexy), eyebright, sea holly, and foxglove.
Sarah your list is so dreamy ❤️ especially as many of these I don’t know and they sound like a foreign language to me, enchanting. Sounds like scent is a heavy decider in your list, it’s so powerful in its ability to transport us elsewhere. Your description of meadowsweet ✨
I’m not a double bloom man. So the double narcissus is just not on my list. Ever. I’m not too sure about the ranunculus…and ambivalent re the rose (I like them here for their blowsy wanton quality…but they are leaning, hugely, into double bloom land…
And I’m kind of with Sarah below with replacing daffodils for the narcissus…a bit bigger, more assertive.
I would take out, without a second glance, the double narcissus and replace (at the head off the list) them with tulips. Any kind: parrot, egg, whatever. Most colours (maybe not lilac…). They, in their exhibitionist phallic triumph, are my favourite flowers of all time.
Thanks for your thoughts , loving this conversation. Is it a simplicity thing, the double-petalled dislike? So more of a daisies, phlox, chamomile, anemones, orlaya fan? Hear you on the tulips. I adore them (but again I’d have gone for the peony-style ones haha ) Would totally be here if they were easier to get hold of here and I’d maybe not just lost a whole crate of them to rot (arrived from Europe in a bad way) uugghhh
Hey, yes I think it is, in part, a simplicity thing going on re single over double. Like, in any flower.
Dig anemones, daisies.
But weirdly, I’m also into chrysanthemum, peonies, and some roses…
But…maybe here’s the thing…the simple ones are the ones I would want in the house. The blowsy guys can do their thing outside in a garden. I’m more cool with that.
P.S. all your images are just absolute perfection.
Ohh what gorgeous photos and flower selection! I wouldn’t mind at all to have them both in my space 🥰
Love your Top 10, Lisa! So hard to choose. Sweetpeas, roses and dahlias will always have my heart. Would add Snapdragon, Ammi, Daucus Dara, Ranunculus and Tulips to the list, if allowed 5 more. Your guide is a beautiful work of art! Thank you.
Love your 5 extra, Ammi is magic, I haven’t had huge success with it although I’m desperate to. And daucus is a permanent feature in my garden, aren’t they so perfectly floaty?
Gorgeous words and images as always. Loved the guide it is stunning.❤️
Thanks Mel 🤍🤍🤍
What a great idea! I think picking 10 favorites is a wonderful way to count all the reasons to celebrate some wonderful blossoms. (Then, pick an entirely new 10 favorites and do it again 🤣) You portraits are captivating.
Good luck with your Cosmos! I had them come up like weeds two years in a row, then nothing at all for two years, and I'm trying again right now. Gardening has to be one of the most forcibly-optimistic-or-you-may-as-well-just-give-up activities in the world :)
Haha well said! And we refuse to give up 😂 sadly my garden doesn’t love cosmos as much as I do, it either stagnates small or is huge with broom stick stems and min flowers. Too molly coddled maybe
They are such divas sometimes seriously, "You want more attention? That's too much attention? You were fine yesterday but today everything's wrong?" Ah well, hopefully stubbornness is key :)
Oh my gosh, I think I would agree with you on nearly all of these!
I love love love Icelandic poppies, but I feel like they have a temperamentalness (that's almost certainly not a word!) that gives me the fear, so in my commercial floristry work I don't use them that much. But as a flower I'd have in my house they'd definitely be in the top five.
I think I would boot out cosmos for delphinium. And maybe swap daffodils for narcissus. I'm almost certain I'm forgetting some favourites.
Loved reading your list! I hear you on the poppies, even in the ground they're temperamental. I'm still a starry-eyed fan. Delphinium is gorgeous, such structure! Perhaps I should've said narcissus as opposed to daffs, to include all my favourite small and dainty ones, cheerfulness! paperwhites!! I think I will edit that right now :D
Appreciate your diagram on spacing. Planted some beautiful multi colored amaranth -large - and want to be sure I am spacing them right. Bought from a gorgeous company in Canada. First time.
Love your book. Is it being published??
I love your whole list, all the flowers on it, the pictures you've chosen and the words but especially your description of the scent of stock - "their ability to invoke a creamy-vanilla-clove reverie in the middle of winter. I have always felt like they got shorted a bit on the name front, stock doesn't sound like something that would conjur up reverie but you're so right that it does.
My personal 10 (and I bet when im drifting off to sleep tonight I'm going to be revising this in my head) would be ... jasmine (the smell of jasmine at night makes me think of my best traveling moments) meadowsweet (smells like marzipan and great for mead making), rose, honeysuckle (on a warm evening, when I'm listening to birds. Or made into a syrup and then ice cream), sweet pea, bluebell, choisya (smells like honey but also insanely sexy), eyebright, sea holly, and foxglove.
Sarah your list is so dreamy ❤️ especially as many of these I don’t know and they sound like a foreign language to me, enchanting. Sounds like scent is a heavy decider in your list, it’s so powerful in its ability to transport us elsewhere. Your description of meadowsweet ✨
So, I’m with you some of the way…
I’m not a double bloom man. So the double narcissus is just not on my list. Ever. I’m not too sure about the ranunculus…and ambivalent re the rose (I like them here for their blowsy wanton quality…but they are leaning, hugely, into double bloom land…
And I’m kind of with Sarah below with replacing daffodils for the narcissus…a bit bigger, more assertive.
I would take out, without a second glance, the double narcissus and replace (at the head off the list) them with tulips. Any kind: parrot, egg, whatever. Most colours (maybe not lilac…). They, in their exhibitionist phallic triumph, are my favourite flowers of all time.
Cool photos.
Thanks for your thoughts , loving this conversation. Is it a simplicity thing, the double-petalled dislike? So more of a daisies, phlox, chamomile, anemones, orlaya fan? Hear you on the tulips. I adore them (but again I’d have gone for the peony-style ones haha ) Would totally be here if they were easier to get hold of here and I’d maybe not just lost a whole crate of them to rot (arrived from Europe in a bad way) uugghhh
Hey, yes I think it is, in part, a simplicity thing going on re single over double. Like, in any flower.
Dig anemones, daisies.
But weirdly, I’m also into chrysanthemum, peonies, and some roses…
But…maybe here’s the thing…the simple ones are the ones I would want in the house. The blowsy guys can do their thing outside in a garden. I’m more cool with that.
A bunch of simple faces in a vase 👌
But…only a blue or a green glass one.