Admit the truth; do you ever watch, or have you ever watched, Martha Stewart on TV?   Years ago, before her – what should we call it … prisonic period – I did watch once or twice.  I was always amazed at how much importance she could attach to papier mache (nothing the likes of this wonderful dragon, but I don’t dare post anything directly from Martha here … oh no oh no),  or the time she’d devote to building a bookcase entirely made of popsicle sticks and recycled pink pearl erasers.  I didn’t think I’d ever watch her again, but I did, and not much about the tone of the show had changed at all.  She was still kind of snooty.  She was just so full of herself cutting out paper flowers and gluing them to twigs with a glue gun.  Oh my God.  I was pretty sure that isn’t where I wanted to go.  And then there was a really interesting recipe for Eggplant Caponata Crostini; I tried it and it is truly delicious.  The show was picking up.

And then …. Peony’s Envy lady came on. Peony’s Envy is a nursery and display garden in Bernardsville, New Jersey , not far from New York City or Philadelphia (lucky you guys who live in PA and NY).  The owner and founder, Kathleen Gagan (the Peony’s Envy lady herself) was trained as a linguist and international corporate communications expert … a career she successfully pursued abroad.  She came back to the U.S. as a Mom and now she’s enjoying life as a Peony farmer.  Amazing story!  Talk about reinventing yourself huh?  Anyhow, she talked for quite a long time about the peony and the more I listened the more enchanted I became. I learned all about the ins and outs and trials and tribulations of growing peonies.  I learned that those beautiful blooms will disintegrate as soon as it rains on them, and in a way that made me like them even more.  They’re out of this world gorgeous and so tender and delicate … like a flower.  In the fall I’m definitely going to order a Tree Peony; the blossoms will grow to as much as 8″ across and they’ll climb up along my fence in the backyard.

Gardening has become something that I love to do, although it wasn’t always that way.  There was the year that my mother let me plow up the back 10 feet or so of her backyard to put in a garden and I planted lots of things, including squash.  Before you knew it half of her backyard was being over-run with squash and I’m only sorry I didn’t try to get into the Guiness Book of World Records for some of the gigantic specimens we  grew that year.  Unfortunately, 25 pound zucchini isn’t much cook for cooking though.

We took out the grass on our front lawn a few years ago and replaced it with a kind of groundcover called Ajuga.  We must have planted 100 wee plants and … the next year … they were almost all gone.  We planted more and again they disappeared.  After several years of adding more and more Ajuga each year but getting nowhere closer to ground being covered I realized that likely when I was weeding in the early spring I was pulling out all the little baby Ajugas by accident.  Or at least that’s what I thought; guess I should apologize to generations of Ajugas … mea culpa!  So two years ago I decided – now that I had more time to work on the garden – that I’d change it from groundcover to perennials that were interesting and beautiful.  This is my 3rd year with this garden and it’s growing more beautiful each year.

To backtrack just a bit (although you might have already figured this out yourself); you might be wondering how bad a day it could have been that drove me to watching Martha Stewart anyhow.  There wasn’t anything in particular problematic going on; it was just one of those days when I didn’t feel motivated to get up and do anything.  More honestly, I have so much to get done in the next six weeks that I’m caught somewhere between frozen in fear and total avoidance behaviours .  And so, avoiding the work I needed to get done,  I’d spent the first couple of hours of the day sitting in bed, watching TV, reading a couple of papers, and drinking a latte (yup, David still brings me one each morning … accompanied – as befits the season – with fruit, a touch of granola, and yogurt).  I was feeling sort of blue-ish and lost.  Until I watched the Peony lady that is.

Suddenly I felt filled with energy.  That’s it!!!!  I figured it out.  I’m going to devote the rest of my life to peonies and stop worrying so much about everything else.  And that got me up and out into my garden and into the sunshine.

So all I can say for today is thank you, thank you, thank you … Martha.