Summertime

Getting ready for a big wedding that I'm working on with Max Lampert, my dear friend and design cohort. We are traveling the bay area, sourcing the best flowers and plants. The great San Francisco Flower Mart will be the primary source for flowers. But after you've been to the Mart time after time (and you're not completely overwhelmed) your tastes refine and you become- well, a flower snob; a stealthy sleuth, hunting out the best, the wildest, the most amazing... 

This photo is an ode to the blue trumpet vine I ripped out this year. It was growing up into my venerable quince bush. For years I managed the vine by cutting it back every winter when the quince lost it's leaves- which meant pretty make climbing into the thorny quince and untwining and extracting the trumpet vines back to the ground, only to have the vines roots install themselves more deeply amongst the quince. I'm not even going to mention that it also had a jasmine vine entrenched too. Whoops.

Finally a decision had to be made; the vines were choking the quince, sucking the life out of it. Nature, survival of the fittest. What did I want? A large dead shrub with two vines duking it out? It could have gone that way.  So this spring, armed with poison and a paint brush, I systematically painted every vine leaf I could get a hold of so the poison would kill the vines without harming the quince. Now, no more trumpet and jasmine vines. The quince is slowly recovering. I really miss that blue trumpet vine. The jasmine never really flowered, so it was easier to let go of. But the bank of blue flowers every summer. Oh my... If I can figure out a place in the garden for another to go wild and free, the Blue Trumpet will ride again.