grounding the dream (or, the birth of Lilac Corner)

Work with me here friends; Envision! Envision! With the purchase of this tiny (acre & a half) farm {flower farm} we are finally able to ground the dream that has been in vapors for a year and a half. I will give you the bare bones of the back story; we needed to move. I had contracted lilac fever (to add to rose, violet, etc fever) and needed a cooler place to grow them than where we were living. For a long time our sights were set on NY but...NY did not work out. A very good friend living just an hour north of us pulled and pulled and pulled our rope until finally we were perched on the side of the Blue Ridge Mountains, at 3000 ft elevation (up from 900) and a mere mile & a half from the Blue Ridge Parkway. As someone who had played along this backbone (not to mention the rest of the animal) of  the surrounding mountains for half her life, this last bit was a serious coup.

We ended up on a corner lot, of all things to be had 'out in the sticks'. Well I had the solution to that and it would take more patience before the whole dream coalesced from the mists. But does a dream ever fully coalesce before trailing off into a wisp of another direction?

To all those people driving by and wondering " who is that crazy woman digging holes at 7:15 a.m. or, in the rain??" It's me! This woman who is always swaddled in the mists of her dreams and requires poetry even as her mailing address. This woman whose vapors are scented by the flowers in her head and in the thousands of holes she digs across the span of her life. Whose vapors sometimes precede her; there was an elderly lilac already in residence.

Which put me up to 12 lilacs, 11 who had been uncomfortably waiting in pots, some for over a year while we waited for the mists to clear enough to give us guidance. Four of them were dragged down from NY, no doubt to pout in the heat and wonder "what the...". They should be happy now. Eight of them went into making 'the corner' and the remaining 3 went down to the bottom corner along with the weeping cherry I had started from a seed, 3 years ago and that many feet tall.

Prunus, dear Prunus mume, who had spent all 9 years of her life in a pot has now been liberated/released into the wild...the wild abandon of root freedom and into the wilderness of microbes between her toes.

The violet collection went through a major downsizing as we decided to wait till next summer to put up the glasshouse; the ark sailed with only one of each of the 8 different Odoratas, knowing that one violet plant is really a mama with fledglings under her skirt.

The roses are lined up out in the field under the watch of Urnnie.

And hosts of others. I never made a head count but I'd bet at least 40 plants moved up with us; from 'too large for one person to lift' to numerous small ones tucked in together. Some had been following me around for decades (the roses; 28 years) to last minute grabs as we fled before the developer's bulldozers arrived. I had a lot of help from understanding family & friends!

                                          ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

 Another 'affliction' of mine is cyclamen fever. On one of our early trips from bringing a load of stuff  up from the flatlands, there, perched on the deck railing was a cyclamen. 

This post is dedicated to Steve.