Showers and May Flowers

The past few days of work have been engulfed with changing annual containers and planting beds for summer. It's kinda like changing out your winter clothes with summer clothes, but horticulture style. Today we changed all the beds around the main entrance of the house. We tried to work fast and get it all done before the charter buses of eager women arrived. But alas, I still got caught in the back of an all boys prep school group photo holding my shovel. I am sure my dirty jeans, disheveled t-shirt, and steel toe boots blended right in with their perfectly ironed white and navy uniforms. One lady even followed me around a bed as I was planting and took pictures of me in action. This recent popularity with the visitors has redeemed my self-confidence after an unfortunate instance on Friday of a woman mistaking me for a man as I was bent over in a bed weeding. I can still hear her shouting down the hill "Excuse me... SIR! Excuse me SIR!!!" Most girls would probably be offended, but lets be real... a gardener's attire is not the most flattering. But I'll take dirty jeans and a t-shirt with muddy boots any day as long as I am getting to spend it in a garden like Winterthur.

Last night's rain storm made the whole property a brilliant shade of green

New flowers loaded up and ready for a new home

After clearing out the beds, we can begin to lay out the new flowers for planting

New window boxes for the security house at the main gate

Its sad throwing out the old flowers, so I rescued some to take home with me 

Memorial Day

This weekend I ate banana pudding two nights in a row... mostly because Mom is in town and Leigh's oven is broken. However, there is something disturbing that currently haunts my banana pudding pleasure...

**Public Announcement: Northerners don't eat banana pudding. Can you imagine a childhood without banana pudding? I ate two helpings, one for me, and one for a deprived northern child somewhere out there above the Mason Dixon line living a banana puddingless life. **

All in all Memorial Day was delightful. Mom and Pops are in town for Leigh's graduation so we ate a lot and laughed a lot. Monday was spent exploring Princeton and pretending to be a suave ivy league student, and it also included some of the best darn ice cream known to man. 

Princeton - Where the prince's go to college

blowing my cool ivy league student cover

Ivy League... get it

Always a good time with this crew

The Art of Work

Spending time as a gardener binds you to the land in a way that only a few professions have the capability of doing. There is something deeply satisfying about digging your hands into the dirt, or ripping a weed out of the ground, or snipping a stem with pruners. Your hands are your most powerful tool. As humans, we need to touch the earth.

The other day my mom and I were at the movie theater after a stressful day of moving and an extra strenuous trip to Target where it felt like the entire state of Delaware was shopping. We ate Mexican and headed to the theater in need of some R and R and a good ole fashioned chick flick. While standing in line at the concession stand, I became engulfed in a sea of teenagers in graphic tees texting and yelling things while kids were running about with candy and popcorn flying and my mom was having every ice cream option listed for her in detail. I am also pretty sure a baby was crying and the smell of popcorn was clogging my lungs. In that moment all I wanted to do was to find some grass and sit in it. Quiet, still, moist, and green. It's comforting. I think our bodies crave it. So the next time you are swirling in a slow motion vortex of noise and and graphic tees, just find yourself a real nice patch of something green and run your fingers through it and see if that doesn't do your heart some good. 

This week I helped plant 800 plants in the fern gully, learned how to weed eat, and waved as trams filled with smiling white headed folk passed through the garden. I also only stalled the trucks 3 times today! It's the little things.

Loading the Premo with pretty things to be planted

Sun streaming through the Azalea woods in the morning

My favorite evening reading nook

My weekend find

View from Oak Hill towards the old dairy barn

View from Oak Hill towards the house

I check on the Peonies everyday because I am deeply in love

Spring and Saturdays

Saturday my sister Leigh, who lives in Philadelphia, visited me with three of her friends! I do not think there could have been a more beautiful day. We walked around the garden, and they were all very kind to let me babble about plants and history. We found a small bench on top of a hill overlooking the rolling meadows with the old dairy barn and pond in the distance. We also had a romp around the Enchanted Woods and found little tables for tea parties and trees with fairies inside. I like to imagine the Enchanted Woods are Neverland and that the lost boys live in the oak near the cottage. Ah, to be a child again.

Hollow trees are fun (thanks for the pic Lauren!)

Lucy found the Enchanted Woods very peaceful

Primrose in full bloom in the old stone quarry

Happy we can hop in a car instead of an airplane to see each other!

That sky and that view.... ahhhh

Intern Life

I am now officially an intern at Winterthur Gardens and Estate! Can I get a woop woop! My background check must have cleared and they gave me an official badge with my face on it. I look like I don't have a neck in the picture due to an unfortunate camera angle, hopefully public safety can still identify me without this very important feature.

So far I am loving the intern life. I started work on Monday, and I wasn't quite sure what to expect. My major take away from this week is how wonderful the entire group of staff is! The entire garden department for the estate is located in a group of buildings up on a hill back in the woods, I like to call it Garden Village. Everyone is always discussing new weeds, or how the winter damaged the hydrangea's new growth, or how raccoons got into the trash again, or what seeds they are about to plant in their summer garden. Everyone is equally enchanted with Winterthur's garden and it forms an energy in the building that I wish I could bottle up. Everywhere you can hear the clunk of steel toe boots and slamming screen doors and the hum of gator trucks zooming back and forth from the garden to the tool barn. It was a week full of new people, new sounds, and new knowledge in a beautiful new place. New things have a way of being daunting and exciting all at the same time.

This week I learned many new skills. I used the backpack blower and the push mower and a weeding knife. I used ear plugs and safety glasses and rain pants with suspenders. My major task of the week was was learning to drive stick... duh duh duh dunnnnn. I have never touched a clutch. Actually, I had to ask what that was. The woman who was teaching me was so kind and patient. I really thought I had it mastered as we cruised around the flat parking lot, so she took me on a back trail through a field. I was attempting to reverse on a bridge over a pond and almost catapulted my teacher in the water. I could see the panic in her eyes even though she was still saying "you are doing great!" Since then I have learned to wave cars past at stop signs so they don't see me stall twice before I can start moving again, and I avoid reversing at all costs...

My other major take away from this week is that the largest percentage of people who come to Winterthur during the week is elderly women. If you know me you know how exciting that is because there really is nothing I love more than talking to elderly people. I absolutely adore them. I love their stories, I love that they can't work their cell phones, and I love it when they stop in mid-walk to identify a bird call from a nearby tree. I also love the super vocal ladies, most likely with hearing loss, who I can hear yelling about some beautiful site even when the garden tram is half a mile away. They all wear adorable hats and they come on charter buses from different states and they never fail to ask why the reflecting pool is black. 

I get off work around 2:30, so I spend my afternoons exploring the gardens and reading or sketching on a bench. The weather is heavenly and I am trying to soak up all the blooms before they are gone. Here are some shots from one night when it was overcast and the lighting was so dreamy! 

Peony

Old stone wall dripping in succulents

Iris

Columbine

Azalea Woods

Rhododendron Bloom

Woodland Phlox

Blue Bells and Hostas

Ferns as far as the eye can see

Pink Pink Pink Azaleas

March Bank

Here are some sights from my drive to the grocery store the other night. At one point I passed a beautiful old barn with cows in a field and the sun setting in the sky, and I instinctively threw my arm in the air and gave a big ole AMEN! Sights like this do the soul good.

Main drive through Winterthur

Bad quality phone pic of an old covered bridge

Over and out from Delaware! Include my stick driving skills in your morning prayers if the spirit so leads you to do so. I need all the help I can get.

The First State

I am officially a resident of Delaware.

I giggle every time I say that I live in Delaware. The side effects of that must wear off sometime soon right? My mom and I made the two day road trip out here last weekend. We drove through many mountains,  practiced our French with a new app I downloaded, sang to Barry Manilow, and experienced Washington DC traffic. We also only stopped long enough to grab hamburgers and use the restroom, typical Hendry road trip style

But we made it to Delaware. The first state. It is quite spectacular I must say. Its green with rolling hills, lots of old people, cute towns and stone walls with old farms and curvy roads. I think I could never get tired of just driving around. Actually I am tired of driving around, I want someone to drive me so I can look out the window, that would work much more nicely. 

I am living in a little cottage tucked back in the woods with 4 of the other interns. It has a glass sun room with fluffy couches, and all I can see out my window is trees. It also smells like my grandmother's old house, and I love it. 

The old Butler's House, my woodland home for the summer

Celebrating Mother's Day in the Garden, not too shabby!

Mom with her beloved Peonies