Garden Girls ~ Jaime's

Fall is in full swing as we arrive at Jaime’s for the last of this season Garden Girls tours. It seems like only last week that we had started our semi-weekly tours at my own garden, and yet months of digging holes, adding perennials, building compost bins, and planting weather have gone by. As we gathered on this evening, Jaime had already done a lot of gathering herself, of herbs and olive branches, and our olive branch wreaths were made for us and waiting for their adornments. After an all too quick tour of the pumpkin garden where Kevin has nurtured tiny seeds to humongous proportions, and the potager that Jaime has been lovingly creating and tending for the last few years, we placed ourselves around the many long tables covered with everything aromatic and wonderful that had been harvested from the gardens, and set about making an herb wreath to grace our front doors. The sunset could not have been more soothing and relaxing, the clouds filling the sky over the alfalfa field that stretches for acres to the west. As the sky gathered into darkness we pulled our chairs up by the fire and filled ourselves with hearty homemade soup and apple pie made from the harvest of the tree that shadowed us. As the unofficial photographer/blogger/memory keeper of these evenings, I like to wander alone through the gardens and see where my eye lands. I know the hours that are spent lovingly caring and tending to each small garden that together make up the homestead. Jaime has an abundance of small areas filled with roses for aromatic sensory overload, pumpkins of all sizes and colors that get delivered to friends

porches for that first surprise of Fall, herbs for tonight’s soup and perennials for small blasts of color everywhere. As I walked past an area of the potager I gazed down at a grouping of bricks that were just a small partial area of one pathway. I saw all of us that gather at these garden tours in those bricks…..how with no real intent, we were placed together on this small area of the earth, to fill in for each other spots that were somehow empty. Be it with creativity and ideas, or support, friendship and love. We just fit...…together.