I will be the first to admit that I shop for holiday gifts via the internet.  It is an amazing convenience for a working person like me.  Not that I take the easy way out.  I do try to make the effort to research for those things that are out of the ordinary. I read most every day the Canadian blog Poppytalk-I so love how they provide a market for independent and small business people who create distinctively individual and enormously creative objects. Check out www.tinytoadstool.com.  Is her work not astonishingly inventive and beautiful?  I found her via Poppytalk.       

I can explain further why shopping on line is a big help to me.  Anyone involved as I am in a retail store is incredibly busy this time of year. The shop gets outfitted for the holidays between October 15 and November 15-this takes every bit of 30 days.  My landscape company does an astonishing number of winter and holiday projects between November 15 and December 20th. Most of those projects I have not photographed yet-no time yet. I design,  run a crew, and fabricate.  I make things for the store in my spare time.  It seems like I am working in the spaces between the days too. The shop grounds need dressing  for the winter-I plan to finish that up tomorrow. I am late on the finish-I didn’t have an idea I liked until 3 days ago.  My Sundays are a mix of planning the week ahead in the morning, and working the shop in the afternoon. The Sunday opinion post-over a slow weekend, I write it Sunday morning.  Over a fast paced Sunday, I do it Sunday night or Monday morning-as in now.  Even the weekly/daily posts get behind, though I try my best to keep up.  This leaves me not so much time to shop.  I have a brother I adore, and a sister in law I adore even more- in Colorado.  Shopping for them, and Buck, and my close friends is a serious business.  I fret and fume over locating the perfect thing for each of them.  Not that I mind this.  All of them are worth every minute I spend.  Should Christmas get too close without a clear sign, I err on the side of being on time with something.  They never seem to mind if a special holiday gift arrives just after New Year’s, but a gift on time counts for much.  I never shop my own shop for for the people I love-I doubt I need to explain this.

Shopping for Deborah Silver and Company, or for Detroit Garden Works is a much different kind of shopping.  Were I able to make internet inquiries and purchases for materials for my landscape company and store in the time it takes to click, I still would not do it.  In fact, sourcing great materials involves much more than an email enquiry.  But more importantly, we are known for a collection you will not find elsewhere.  A collection based on the eye and experience and aesthetic point of view of our group.  Rob travels overseas and all over this country to auctions, antiques markets and shows. He shops local markets.  He drives places he has not been, with the express purpose of maybe meeting people who make or collect interesting objects and plants. Over the past 18 years he has met no end of small independent business owners who have very special products to sell.  On occasion, he will be able to convince them to produce their glazed terra cotta pots in a color they do not ordinarily do.  Or in a sized they have not done before.  Their willingness to accomodate his special requests has a lot to do with the fact that he made time to go and meet them in person, and cultivate a relationship.  We may reorder from a vendor once we have established a relationship with them, but in the beginning, all of our buying is done in person. 

My landscape superintendent Steve Bernard travels extensively over the winter, sourcing plant materials, tools, new techniques, and landscape materials.  This means he visits nurseries and growers all over this country. He reviews their material, and their growing practices.  When he buys, he buys specific plants. Viewing in person-there is no substitute. Some of my relationships with growers date back to the 1980’s.  When I worked for Al Goldner, he insisted that everyone travel to meet growers and hybridizers.  He taught me to do this, and I have done so ever since.  Shopping like this takes lots of time, effort and committment.  Plane tickets.  Meals and lodging.  Car rentals, phone charges.  Days away from home.  Some trips prove fruitless, but no matter; we keep looking.  Our interests evolve. One thing can lead to an intriguing another, should the effort be made.  I do this so my clients get the benefit of our collective eyes.  I do this so both the shop and my landscape company stay fresh and vital.  I also really enjoy it; it’s satisfying to find something new and beautiful.  There are lots of beautiful things out there-it just takes some effort to find them. 

I cannot buy ribbon for the holidays via the internet, or a catalogue.  I need to see it in person-I need to put my hand and my eye to the spool, and decide if it represents our idea of useful, interesting, and beautiful.

In the course of one day, my pruners (labelled with my name) may move from my tool box to my desk, to the work table in the garage to the counter and on to my layout table in the office; I might find them several days later in my purse.  Or in a cardboard box out back.  How is it that this tool travels?  My Joyce Chen shears are small-they vanish from under my nose, and may appear a month later in my junk drawer at home. Later Buck might fish them out of my jeans back pocket. I have a floral supply bureau-it is home to corsage pins, floral tape, wired picks, stephanotis holders, bout tape, and fern pins.  Why do all of these things seem to leave home under their own steam, never to return?  Are they on vacation?  They will reappear at some later date-invariably down the street someplace. 

I have both of my Mom’s 1950’s blond mahogany dressers at the shop-I store my ribbons in it.  I store the bits and pieces I cannot throw away, the embroidery floss, my Mom’s embroidery needles still stored in their pierced paper card, a button box. A collection of rolls double faced satin ribbons-a treasure. I always have lime green on hand.  The red, the fig, the cream white, the purple-I like these too. Narrow velvet ribbons backed in satin, small spools of hand dyed silk ribbon, wired metallic ribbon-four drawers of them.  I use them on occasion for parties, weddings, and events-I did put some of them in the shop for the holidays.  This does not account for the red satin ribbon I saw on a bench in the greenhouse today-how did it get there?

My tool kit was a Christmas present from Buck a few years ago.  Wire clips, utility pruners, a girly hammer, big pliers, needle nose pliers, tweezers, a hole punch, utility shears, a slew of screwdrivers both slotted and Phillips head, a hefty 25 foot tape measure-tools I never knew existed he put in my box.  An addendum to the tool box-a small battery drill and a Dremel tool with all the bells and whistles.  That kit is the home base of a central nervous system that makes it possible for me to transform an idea into an object.  I am certain those tools get up and go out at at night-who knows where they will be in the morning. Gathering up the tools is the first move I make in the morning.

Some projects defy completion without the proper tools at hand.  My Niwashi traditional tool is Japanese designed and made.  Its angled blade makes short work of grubbing out roots and weeds, and turning soil.  After I use it, I wash and wipe the blade clean.  It is my favorite garden tool-how would you know that?  I always know exactly where it is.  It is always where I last saw it-which is where it belongs.  My rubber rake, my spade, my trowel, my five gallon weed bucket-these things might be anywhere.  Who would want them, besides me?  Sooner or later, they hitch a ride home.

My digital camera is one of my most valued tools.  A picture of a pot I want redone for winter, a garden I need weeded and staked, a tree I need lighted-the pictures tell the story better than I could.  Pictures that I print at 7 am I cannot find at nine.  Where do they go?  They might be outside next to a barrel full of redtwig dogwood.  They may be on my layout table.  They may be stuffed into my coat pocket.  Some vanish without a trace-I suspect they just picked up and inexplicably moved to Indiana.  I reprint the pictures.  Some pictures come back to me with the daily job report.  These pictures have absorbed every ounce of water from the wet hands that handled them.  These blurry sheets in the file-Monica deals with them without comment. She has infinitely more dignity and aplomb than I-where were those pictures today?  Clearly not in the truck.  In the bottom of a bucket, under a wet sleeve-on the job.

I make 5 by 7 cards for every job.  The card stock is sturdy.  I tack each card on my cork board.  Should a card come off the board, and travel to garage-trouble.  Those floating cards move in and out of my view-and my grasp. A job card on the loose-this I dread.  Who takes those cards off my board, and tosses them into the atmosphere?  Where did I leave my keys?  I know I was working on a vignette in the shop-where did I set down my coffee cup?  Where did I plant that start of European ginger? Did I plant tulips here-or over there?  Did I not order up a family of handmade life size grapevine deer-where are they?

 Christine Jamieson has worked the weekend shift for me for many years. A Brit through and through, she never blinked when I expressed my exasperation about the disappearance of my Joyce Chen shears.  The borrowers got them-she said.  The borrowers?  Who knew; a series of childrens books by Mary Norton-the first of which was published in 1952-posit the existence of the borrowers.  Little people, unbeknownst to humans, live in the floorboards of the homes of the big people.  They borrow whatever they need to survive, unseen by people of my size.  I like this story.  The borrowers-they must be moving my tools around in the middle of the night. They must need to fix or construct something.  Maybe they are bored, and like seeing me seach 10,000 square feet for a pair of shears.  They provide my life with a little challenge I did not plan on.  What could be better?

A reader left a comment yesterday, asking me where my ideas come from.  Serendipitous, this question. A good friend who is an interior designer told me he regularly reads the blog of Seth Godin; he thought I might be interested.  I have been reading it ever since. Why is that? I read what he writes, mainly because I do not understand him.  Day after day, I have no idea what he is talking about. I am intrigued by this. I like to read what he says, in spite of not knowing what he says.   I am not familiar with his language, even though the words are English-this makes following his thought process highly intuitive.  Most of the time I loose track, but I still read start to finish. Sometimes I reread-this does not help me to understand any better.  I forget every sentence the second I am no longer reading it.  But I am confident that some part of me has heard what I have merely seen; something will sooner or later surface, in the form of some idea or another.  How when or why, I have no idea, nor do I much worry about that.  I read every day; I already suspect there is something there that means something to me.  That is enough to keep reading.

Where am I going with this?  Anything I might be exposed to may trigger an idea. A while ago I posted about wrapping the trunks of my linden trees for the winter.  I referenced a Japanese exchange student-roommate I had in college.  When Tomoyo was about to leave to go home, she gave me a picture of herself in remembrance of our friendship. I remembered her name for the first time in many years, writing this sentence.  She was standing next to a tree in downtown Tokyo whose trunk had been wrapped with a bamboo blanket for the winter. Who knows why I remember the photograph so vividly, though I am sure I did not want her to leave.  But my exposure to that wrapped tree, so many years before I ever but a shovel to the ground, stayed with me. The  40 years later, I had the idea that my trees might look good with winter coats.

Seth Godin actually wrote a post just a few days ago about where ideas come from.  Nature is on his list.  For me, nature is an endless source of inspiration.  This is not particular to me.  Ideas based in nature-who could begin to count them all? The monk who observed the conditions under which fruit trees thrive and bear heavily had the idea to grow trees in forms which came to be known as espaliers.  Someone observed a bank of cumulus clouds, and thought to prune boxwood in those shapes.    I am an avid reader.  Garden books, fiction, design magazines, magazines written in languages I cannot understand.  I read recipes, although I have no interest in cooking.  I read cereal boxes and maps of places I have never been.  Maybe ideas do come from reading, from other people, from places, from history, from experience-and from all the other places Mr. Godin cites.  But ideas that come from within may just come out of no where-surprise, surprise, and hello.

I knew I was nuts in love with gardening at a fairly early age.  In my mid twenties, a single orchid plant I bought on an inexplicable whim-I set the a slipper orchid potted in green plastic on the picnic table under an oak.  This move, the sum total of my interest in the landscape of my rented house in Chapel Hill North Carolina.  A week later I had three.  3 months later I had fifty.  I could not get enough of those paphiopedilums-the slipper orchids. Caring for the paphs left me barely enough time to go to work.  I read everything I could get my hands on.  Though some paphs are ephiphytes (air-rooters), and some are lithophytes, they are by and large rooted in what passes in tropical countries for soil-very composty, thin soil.  From the Paphs I moved on to the phragmepediums-a logical progression to my mind. Slipper orchids with tails-beautiful.

Orchids make up the second largest family of plants on the planet.  This would be in excess of 26,000 species-2 times the number of bird species, and 4 times the number of mammal species.  There are easily over 100,000 cultivars of orchid species.  Though these statistics make my 50 plants seem like nothing, I was 25 and struggling to make ends meet. Nonetheless, I was busy buying orchids. Making homes for them.  Fussing and fretting over them.  Moving on from the paphiopedilums to the phragmipediums-I did not have the sense to realize that if I didn’t want to dig myself in deeper, I should quit digging.  I have been digging ever since. Should you be familiar with orchid flowers-they are not particularly pretty.  They are arresting in form and color.  I was mesmerized. 

 I had a wee garden as a child-my Mom saw to that.  I planted radishes, beans, stuck sticks in the ground, collected rocks, built fences and carved stream beds into the ground.  Though I remember little from that long ago, I remember that dimunuitive landscape.  It was fenced.  My Mom made no inquiries-she averted her gaze. She never intruded-she just encouraged me.  On occasion, I would invite her to my garden-when I was in a tea party mood.   Once I was 10, all of that interest went dormant-until at 25, I saw that orchid.  Some circuit got switched on-a three phase electrical system with three hot wires, and one neutral wire.  240 volts, and 100 amps-this is a whomping lot of electricity.  I was oblivious to the amperage-after all, all I had done was buy an orchid plant. The paphs and the phrags were followed by the dendrobiums, the oncidiums-I was head over heels nuts in love. 

By the time I was 29, in 1979,  I had bought 5 acres of land including an unliveable, and uninsurable house.  I was blithely unconcerned about the furnace set in a hole under the house-on a dirt floor.  My trouble with that would come later.  I could not take my eyes off of all of that land.  I had land.  My nuts in love circuit- switched on.  I cajoled a neighbor with an ancient Ford tractor to set giant boulders in a slope I meant for a rock garden.  I alone double dug a peony bed some 80 feet long.  I mapped out a wild flower garden fully three quarters of an acre, and planted it. Years later, it featured stands of yellow lady slipper orchids, and 2 handsome clumps of cypripedium reginae.  Violets of every description bloomed in the lawn and beds as far as the eye could see.  I sorely miss that garden.  I planted thickets of Michigan holly in the low and swampy spots. I planted starts of acer triflorum-gifts from nurseryman Ed Losely-and dragged the hoses hundreds of feet to keep them watered. A metasequoia from work whose leader had snapped off-I planted that too.  I bought so many peonies I finally lined them out like crops.  Over the course of 15 years I planted better than 20,000 daffodils in the orchard meadow-most of which were purchased at Frank’s nursery for a nickel a piece after Thanksgiving. I had room for everything, and time for little. I would mow the two acres of grass at night-thank heavens my tractor had a headlight.  Gardening with a flashlight-routine. The grime under my nails was a permanent fixture. 

That five acre property from my thirties belongs to someone else now-thank heavens.    My nuts in love is still three phase-just three different phases.  I have the landscape, the shop, and Branch-all of which take lots of energy, and all of which give me lots of energy.  No matter how or why I garden, there are card carrying gardeners everywhere nuts in love just like me.  How great is this?