Straw Hats and Sunflowers

    Reader beware: You are about to be inundated with Flowers. Flowers up to your eyeballs and into the clouds and twining round your ankles; acres and acres of flowers! Are you in Heaven? No, you are at the Sunflower Festival! 

 I only WISH I could grow flowers like this. The Mistress of this garden is Rena Holt. Once a year, over the 4th of July Holiday, folks come from far and wide to fill a $10 bucket with jolly, fat faced Sunflowers grown on this old farm place in Georgia, listen to music, drink lemonade and purchase art and craft from folks like myself. 

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 I am in love with Rena's gardens. They are lush, thick, wild-crazy, and wonderful cottage gardens.  She plants  everywhere!.

 She plants in stone piggys,

wheelbarrows,

old farm implements,

more wheelbarrows,

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against plain wire fences

and   funny stick fences,

in old window boxes, neath the old windows on an old sharecropper shack.

 You can see the flowers from inside in the old shack,

and in a pot that sits in that old kitchen.

Here is the delightful potting shed where Rena works her magic.

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 Her runner beans reach for the skies upon bamboo pyramids.

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Lavender grows with abandon,

and the color purple has it's very own corner.

 I like her motto,"Dull women have tidy gardens".... I like that a lot! I must be incredibly interesting.

I asked Rena how on earth she does all this by herself and she confessed,"I just let the flowers grow and grow from seeds dropped last year, and then, 2 weeks before the festival, I call the garden club to come and weed with me."

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 Gee, I wish I had a garden club.

I think she is a bit too modest, we gardeners KNOW how much work all this  requires. 

All I know is, I am planting a million sunflower and zinnia seeds as soon as possible!