I took last Friday off and had another long weekend. Hooray! “I have so much to do!” I said to Rob on Thursday night. “Well, you won’t be able to get to it all,” Rob warned kindly. “But I’m going to try!” I said. Here …
Last Monday at my lunch hour I ran over to Rabbit Creek, a great new antique mall in Tallahassee, and bought a rocking chair and footstool I’d had my eye on for a while. The owner of the booth where I found the chair was …
On Saturday I made a new improvement to the back bedroom. When Rob went out to get his hair cut, I ran up to Bainbridge, Georgia, and bought an old doctor’s cabinet I’d seen at Sharon House Antiques.
Bainbridge is a little town 20 miles north of Quincy. Getting there involved a pleasant drive through the country. I passed pecan orchards, Lady Moon Farms (a big organic farm), and the FAMU Research and Extension Center (260 acres of farmland, pines, and lakes). The road was bordered on both sides by banks of brilliant, sun-drenched goldenrod.
Bainbridge is such a cool little place, with oak-shaded streets, charming old homes, and a thriving downtown with a lovely green park at its heart. Just across from the park, which features a fountain and a Victorian gazebo, is Sharon House Antiques. The shop is a treasure trove, jam-packed with china, glittering glassware, paintings, carpets, furniture, and even glamorous old evening gowns!
As I browsed around the shop, another customer exclaimed, with a dazzled, deliriously happy expression, “Oh, wow, this is just like . . . sensory overload to me! There’s so much to see!”
“I know,” I said. “Don’t you love it?”
“Oh, I do!” she said.
Once I had made my purchase, I had to carry the quite heavy and extremely unwieldy doctor’s cabinet down the sidewalk by myself and hoist it into my car without looking like I was struggling. I don’t think I was successful; I was definitely struggling. I sailed back home, then had to get the cabinet into the house by myself since Rob wasn’t there. Believe me, I had plenty of trouble carrying the cabinet in. Cats escaped. The word crap was said. The screen door kept closing in my face until I tied it open with a jump rope.
I ran into some more difficulties when I began setting up my new purchase. I managed to get it up on the old red desk in the back bedroom, but it was top-heavy and unstable. To prevent it from toppling over, I tried a million schemes that failed, including “gluing” it to the desk with museum wax and stacking bricks on the bottom shelf to act as a sort of ballast. Finally, I ended up securing the cabinet to the wall behind it with screws and wire. Ha ha. I was dealing with that cabinet all day long.
I kept hitting more snags and finding myself in some new pickle.
“Oh, shucks, why did I buy this dang cabinet?” I said to myself at one point, when I realized it was leaning to one side. The floor was slanted, I discovered, so I had to put some little feet under two legs of the desk to level the desk and the cabinet.
The problems kept coming, but luckily, in the end, I solved all them all. By around 7 that evening, the cabinet wasn’t wobbly anymore. It wasn’t crooked. It was adding some nice height to the desk and providing handy storage space for tea cups and other small, cute props that I use in my toy photography hobby.
I was really tired when I went to bed that night. The last thing I saw before I closed my eyes was the cabinet gleaming softly in the lamplight and looking just like I had hoped it would when I set off for Bainbridge that morning.
I think this post needs at least one more picture, so here’s a shot of a painting I finished recently. The composition isn’t my own; I followed a tutorial I found on YouTube.
For years I’d been bothered by a certain little spot in the yard, a weedy, unkempt area at the base of the giant spruce pine that grows by the living room windows. Every time I’d walk past it, I’d say to myself, “Boy, that looks …
I wanted to show you a few more pictures of my pond garden. This is a garden I’ve really struggled to get right. Rob and I built the pond in 2010, and I’ve been working on the surrounding garden ever since. The garden is contained …
In October 2017 Rob and I started developing our latest garden bed—a large curving area under the giant pecan tree in the backyard. For years this new bed looked rather awkward and scrawny, with lots of bare spots and weedy spots, but recently it’s had a glow up. The summer rains have made it so lush that I think I can finally share some pictures without getting too embarrassed.
The first step I took when creating the bed was to build a little stone patio to serve as the centerpiece. Usually my homemade patios are extremely bumpy and slanty, but this one actually looks pretty good. I’m not quite sure why. I think it may be due to the nice flat large stones I was able to procure at Native Nurseries (my favorite nursery in Tallahassee).
Once the patio was in place, Rob and I used garden hoses to help us come up with the shape of the surrounding bed. We traced the outline with blue marking chalk, then went over it with our edger so it would be a little more permanent. We put down heavy-duty brown paper from the hardware store to kill the grass and weeds, and then we covered the paper with pine bark mulch, which we bought by the bag at Roses. When leaves fell on the bed in fall, we let them lie. We even supplemented them with loads of extra leaves that we found on our neighbors’ trash piles.
Because the bed is rather big, mulching it took a while. But filling it with plants took longer; it took years. I like my shade beds to look really natural, like little forests, with an herb layer, a shrub layer, an understory layer, and a canopy layer. In this particular bed, the herb layer is made up of lady ferns, southern wood ferns, Christmas ferns, chain ferns, yellowroot, golden ragwort, and wild violets. The shrub layer consists of coonties, mapleleaf viburnum, camellias, needle palms, hearts-a-bustin’, and wild azaleas. In the understory you’ll find red buckeyes, an Ashe magnolia, and two young cedars, while the canopy is formed by the grand old pecan tree, a beech tree, and a southern magnolia.
In March of this year, I added a tidy edge around the whole bed using bricks arranged in a sawtooth pattern. The brick edging gave the bed a more finished look, and I started feeling pretty pleased with it.
“The new bed isn’t looking so bad anymore,” I said to Rob one day in April.
The animals that live in our yard seem to like it too. I often see box turtles sheltering under the fern fronds, and white squirrels (we have a population of white squirrels in Quincy) scurrying up the trunk of the pecan tree.
Even though I say I’m satisfied with the bed now, I know I’ll keep adding plants and decorations. And the plants will get bigger and more beautiful every year. One of the great things about a garden is that it just keeps getting better over time. It becomes lusher and more detailed; it grows in character. To see it changing and improving is a wonderful reason to get up every morning.
I’d like to introduce you to one of my favorite plants—star jasmine (Trachelospermum jasminoides), a fast-growing woody vine with evergreen leaves and, now, in late spring, loads of small, white, pinwheel-shaped flowers. Star jasmine is lovely to look at, but the real reason you’ll want …
For the past year, I’ve been working on outlining all my garden beds with bricks. I dig a trench around each bed, sink the bricks about halfway into the soil, and arrange them in a sawtooth pattern. The bricks add a nice, tidy edge to …
I’ve been trying to improve the back bedroom again. Everywhere I’ve ever lived, I’ve enjoyed decorating the bedrooms most of all. I had a great bedroom when I was a kid, and I think I’m always trying to re-create the charm of that first place that was my own.
I’ll tell you a bit about my childhood room. It wasn’t all mine, actually; I shared it with my sister Kris. But we were awesome at sharing, and we always saw eye to eye on interior design decisions.
Our room had many delightful touches—like crystal prisms that hung in the windows and threw rainbows all around. (We used the windows just like doors, climbing in and out.) The curtains were trimmed with yellow pompoms to match our bedspreads, which were printed with cheery daffodils and sunflowers.
On one wall was a special clock that our uncle brought us from Korea. It was a Lady (from Lady and the Tramp) clock, and Lady’s large eyes would dart back and forth as the seconds ticked by. Not far away, hanging from a corner of the ceiling, was a marionette, a graceful bird with light pink feathers and little dancing round white plaster feet—a Foo Bird, she was called.
Dolls peered out from every shelf, each dressed to the nines, and shadowboxes were filled with figurines. On every surface there was something funny or cute or “neat” (as we would say)—a tiny tea set, maybe, or a talking bear, or a doll who could ride a bike.
As you can probably tell by the number of toys still on display in my house, my decorating style hasn’t changed too much since I was a kid. (Ha ha, I’m not bragging.) I’m still a fan of whimsy. My favorite decorations are the funny ones, like my little needlepoint portrait of a blue-eyed cat and my absurdly serious-looking plaster sheep. I love finding cheap treasures like these at junk shops. The back bedroom is the result of 30 years of junkin’—I hope you enjoy the pictures!
