about me
I'm Meghan. I have been a gardener for more than 25 years. Before moving to Pownal in the summer of 2020 I did my gardening in a Brooklyn community garden. We lived in 4th-floor apartment with no outside space. The garden was my saving grace, my kids' second home and where I'd often be until the pitch black night. My favorite thing about working in a community garden was creating a beautiful space for my neighbors. I loved hearing that my gardening made a person feel calm, or happy, or that someone loved reading, listening to birds, or thinking at the little table and chair next to the shade garden I tended.
Why Hazel? I was running through name ideas, thinking about some of my favorite flowering trees and which might go with a name. I dig the Latin name, Hamamelis, and the Celtic association of the hazel tree with wisdom, or inspiration. The strange, beautiful flowers of our native hazel trees—one of the few food sources for bees in late fall— inspired my logo.
Flowery rather than farm? I grow on the tree-surrounded bowl of a hill that is decidedly not flat-plowed or farm- like. My most sun-demanding plants get the patch of full sun, the rest are part-shade tolerant. I'm always driving around fantasizing about more sunny land. On the hard days I fantasize about having a more suburban-sized yard.
We all know about stopping to smell the flowers--but do we? I think a lot about the old vanitas paintings, like this one, Rachel Ruysch, A bouquet of marigolds, daisies, poppy anemones, honeysuckle sweet peas and morning glories with a melon on a ledge , 1745:
It's the very ephemerality of flowers that makes the magic work: momentarily pausing the relentless stream of thoughts. Floristry can be an art working on the brain in similar ways to music, painting or poetry. Flowers that last forever become furniture. They can't work the same trick.
To be perfectly honest with you, friends who have read down so far, I have a limited flower buying history. I've always loved having flowers in the house. Mostly I cut or pulled from the sidewalk, the roadside and hoped it didn't wilt that night.
I remember a perfect early June night in the aughts. I bought a few outrageous peonies on the street in Soho, and pinned one to my shrunken jean jacket so I could smell it all night. A handful of times I bought straight bunches of Queen Anne's lace at the farmer's market. In a fit of joy driving outside the city on a summer day I might stop at an honor box for roadside zinnias. There were a small numbers of florist flowers--exactly which stems and which leaves I wanted, picked from tall cold buckets, wrapped, enjoyed.
When starting to grow flowers to sell I went away for a weekend and bought a grocery "mixed market bouquet" like an alien visitor to Earth trying to understand the experience. I removed what I didn't like*, rearranged what was left, mixed in something I cut myself. But, then, I was doing the work. The experiment left me flat, and no less mystified.
I don't care if celosia lasts for a week if the celosia is ugly. Some is beautiful! But I'll take a straight one-variety bunch, a tall roadside armful, a few flowering branches any day any way over something not lovely. For special occasions I love fewer, more care-fully chosen and more beautifully arranged flowers versus columns and reams and pillars and swaths and flotillas painstakingly cut, stripped, sprayed, chemically saturated, composed--and dumped the day after.
I like flowers that invite you in. I like colors soothing and strange. I like natural, but better. I like roses and can't wait till my shrubs get big enough to share them. I have been taking photos of flowers for a very long time. All of my images are copyrighted. Please do not use.
I hope you enjoy my flowers as much, or more, much more, as I have enjoyed growing them.
Like Some Old Fashioned Miracle
When Summertime is done—
Seems Summer's Recollection
And the Affairs of June
As infinite Tradition
As Cinderella's Bays—
Or Little John—of Lincoln Green—
Or Blue Beard's Galleries—
Her Bees have a fictitious Hum—
Her Blossoms, like a Dream—
Elate us—till we almost weep—
So plausible—they seem—
Her Memories like Strains—Review—
When Orchestra is dumb—
The Violin in Baize replaced—
And Ear—and Heaven—numb—
Emily Dickinson