Weather-wise it was a dismal day in Michigan. We are all wondering when we will get a succesion of lasting spring-style days.

I went out a few days ago and checked the gardens. Only a few more things are beginning to pop up. My gardens are just too wind-swept which keeps the temps lower out there. I am trying to combat that for the flowers by planting shrubbery around the garden in defense of the airy blasts. But that won't help yet for a few years.

I saw the peonies trying to make their way through the soil. A hardy little viola was blooming too. Violas are some of the best surprises in the garden. They will pop up anywhere since they are so hardy and prolific in their re-seeding efforts. I try not to destroy them when weeding although they show up pretty much anywhere, refusing to be corralled and tamed.

My English garden is a series of inner and outer flower beds laced with pathways. Violas will often appear right in the pathways. I suspect they cross pollinate as well since no two ever seem to be alike and there is an endless array of color combinations. Another wonderful thing about the violas is that they are the very best flowers for the basis of my pressed flower pictures. Most of you know that I love to make pressed flower arrangements. I have sold several over the years both at the church bazaar and privately. The tiny, flat-faced violas and pansies are the perfect size and color. Their flat characteristics lend well to pressing. I keep huge big-city phone books for the pressing. After the dew is off in the morning is the best time to pick them and arrange them in the pages of the phone books. Days later they are "paper-fied" and it's exciting to see their colors deepen or fade with time.

Joy, joy, joy!! My tiller will once again be in operation this year! This makes the veggie gardening almost sound like fun again. I had a really nice heavy duty tiller that I purchased at a very good price a few years ago at a rummage sale. At first I didn't like the thing because until I learned how to operate it, it operated me. I remember kicking it in a fit of anger one day and maybe that's when I offended it. The next year it didn't want to work correctly. Assuming it would cost an arm and a leg to fix, that's when I talked my husband into buying me the tiller of my dreams, or so I thought. It was a smaller one that I thought I could easily handle. It was inexpensive and did what it said it would do, but alas, one of the features of our property is an abundance of rocks and stones. It seems that my vegetable garden is where most of them are even after 5 years of consistent rock picking. (For the first 3 or 4 years I had the most awful backaches after this spring chore. Finally there are fewer rocks!) I literally picked so many rocks out of this garden in the first 3 years that I was able to completely fill the landscaping around the front porch from garden rocks. Then I ended up removing them all and putting down mulch. So I actually "picked the rocks" twice. All the others were dumped in the fencerows that were already brimming with rocks of all sizes. Anyway, the tines of this smaller tiller are the perfect size to grab most of the stones left in the garden. Sometimes while trying to till I would have to stop 3 or 4 times on one row, take a hammer and chisel the caught stones from between the tines. Needless to say, this got old in a real hurry. Gardening took twice as long as it was supposed to take.

Much to my delight, this spring Clint suggested hauling my big, old tiller to a nearby repair shop. He told the mechanic to fix it if it didn't exceed about half the cost of the machine. Well, I checked yesterday and it was all ready to go at a bargain price! What a blessing! I remember that Rhiannon told me the first year I owned it that the garden looked better that year than any other year. I was able to keep up with the between-row weeds so much better with this wonderful machine. I will never kick it again!

Yesterday I visited a nearby library and noticed a new book in the gardening section. It was about gardening in the hot areas of the midwest. I never would have thought that included us, being in Michigan, but as near as I can figure from the USDA charts, we are part of that region. This book described the challenges of gardening in this area. I had always wondered why I couldn't quite achieve the results that I saw in the lovely books about English cottage gardens. I can testify to the fact that the English gardens are everything the books portray. While Rhiannon and I were there last year in May, all the spring and early summer flowers were in bloom. It is the most beautiful sight. Even the tiniest houses and many apartments have small garden plots on the only available lawn. The flowers had an ethereal, misty quality that was indeed charming. This is the look that I had always tried to achieve. Now that I understand I am living in area considered "challenging" becuase of temperature extremes and frequent midsummer drought, I will be a little less hard on myself and take some of their planting suggestions even if that means more flowers that are not necessarily my favorites.

Having said all this, I was wondering what your favorite flowers are? I hope to hear from you and after I do, I will reveal my "flower of choice." There are so many; I'll have a hard time choosing one, but I have one front-runner that may surprise you. Blessings, LORI