Dirt By Amy Stewart

A Blank Slate

The side garden, before--completely neglected and overgrown.  I just never could get interested in this space.  It only gets morning sun thanks to the shadow our house casts, and because it's by the kitchen door, that's where the recycling and worm bin goes.  Not our most attractive moment.

And the same garden, taken from the gate at the back:

What now?  I suddenly realized that this long, narrow, enclosed space was the perfect place to plant a garden related to my next book.  (No hints!)  So I hired a teenager to help clear it out.  He dug up quite a bit of the lamium near the front, but I've got to brag and say that I hacked away at quite a bit of it myself, transplanted the calla lilies and colombines and whatever else was worth saving, and the result is a lovely, blank slate that I will continue to hoe and rake and work compost and fertilizer into until the tranformation begins...

where did that statue come from? it was completely buried.

ah, the joys of a fresh start....the garden and the book...

Those Naughty Hens

We thought we had foiled the chickens' attempts to lay eggs outside their box by clearing out the nest they had made and blocking the entrance to it, but Eleanor stubbornly refused to give up and made herself a new nest under the berry vines, where the tangle of thorns almost prevented us from finding it.  All four hens have been lectured sternly and sent to bed.   I have no idea what's gotten into them.  They've gone quite wild.

Foreign Policy

I wrote an article for the July issue of Foreign Policy magazine about globalization in the cut flower industry.  You have to be a subscriber to read the whole article online, but the July issue will be on newsstands soon.

Bowl of Cherries

5 x 7 oil on gessoed art board.  SOLD. A couple other auctions are ending soon--check those out here.

Painting in the evening has been so much damn fun.  I usually get started around 8 and go to 10 or 11.  I'm never too tired to paint--in fact, I get my second wind for the day when I start fiddling around with the easel.  A little jazz on the radio, a glass of wine, and I'm happy.

I'm totally in love with these cherries.  There will probably be more cherry paintings this summer, if I can keep from eating them all.

"Today's Eggs"

5 x 7, oil on gessoed art board.  SOLD.  Click here to see all my paintings.

When we're lucky, we get four eggs a day.  As hens get older their egg production declines--and in the chicken world, a two year-old hen is "old" and is usually headed for the stew pot.  Not our girls!  They're two years old and still going strong.  They'll get to live into their dotage in our backyard--and I've heard that chickens can live 10 years or longer. 

The color of a chicken's eggs depend on her breed.  From left to right, we have:  Bess, an Araucana, with a greenish egg, Eleanor (in back) with a medium brown egg, Abigail (in front) with a light brown egg, and Dolley, also an Araucana, with a light blue egg.  The color of an Araucana's eggs can vary a little from bird to bird, and ours are really a kind of mixed breed called an Americauna or an easter egg chicken.

Somebody posted a comment and asked me about style.  I've been painting for about five years, and my painting teacher does encourage us to figure out our own style.  I'm not sure I have what you would call a style, but I have learned how to do certain things well, and I've given up on some other things that just seemed beyond me.  I've figured out how to pick subjects that interest me and that I can actually pull off.  I like to use slick boards because I like the way the paint slides around, and I like to use palette knives and rubber scrapers to push the paint around.  I also like to get a painting done all at once, or in two sessions at the most.  I admire people who work for months on large paintings, but I have to save that kind of patience and tenacity for writing books.  When it comes to painting, I want some short-term gratification.

A couple of fancy art terms for styles I use:  impasto, which is a technique that involves laying the paint on thickly so that brushstrokes and palette knife marks are visible, and alla prima, which means "all at once"--it's a technique that involves finishing a painting in one sitting, while all the paint is still wet.

Sierra Club Radio

I spoke with these folks a couple of weeks ago.  Listen to the interview here.

Our Naughty Chickens

We had noticed that we weren't getting as many eggs from Eleanor, and we thought it was awfully odd that we got no eggs at all yesterday, but we didn't think much of it until Scott found an egg in the compost pile today.  What was it doing there?  Then he noticed that Eleanor was going off by herself and was hard to find.  That's unusual, because usually when they're free-ranging in the backyard, they stick together.

So after a little investigation, we found this nest behind a tall clump of tansy.  It looks like Eleanor, Abigail, and Bess have all taken to laying an egg in this spot when it suits them.  So the girls were rounded up and herded back into the coop, where they will be spending a little more time over the next few days while they get re-acquainted with the concept of laying an egg in an egg box.  They are, after all, farm animals.  When they go off and start acting like wild birds, building nests wherever they please, it's up to us farmers to get them back in line.

Calla Lily

6 x 8, oil on canvas board.  Bidding starts at $9.95.  Click here to bid.

When I was working on Flower Confidential, I developed a habit of going into flower shops anywhere I went.  Sometimes I'd ask a few questions in hopes of finding a good interview subject for the book, but usually I'd just browse, maybe buy a few flowers if I was on my way to meet somebody, then leave.

One of my favorite shops was at Flowers of the World, a florist that did end up in the book.  They own a few flower shops in Manhattan, including one at Takashimaya department store on Fifth Avenue.  This is a very expensive piece of real estate, and the flowers aren't cheap, either.  They are all on display on a table in the middle of the store, like jewelry. 

A white calla lily at Takashimaya can cost $25 or more, depending on the season and the quality.  These flowers grow like weeds in my garden.  On the other hand, I can't grow a peony to save my life, and I know people who think of them as being almost weeds.  Well, the trick is to appreciate what you have, yes?

Eleanor--by popular demand!

8 x 10, oil on gessoed board.  Click to bid.

The other day I was thinking about blogs, and how difficult it would have been to start a blog without digital photography.  In other words, what if all this internet stuff had happened, but somehow no one had thought to invent digital photography along the way and we were all still using film cameras, getting pictures developed, scanning them, etc?  It would be impossible for me to run outside and take a picture of the garden and post it online a few minutes later.

So here I am, illustrating my blog with oil paintings. Is that a step backward?  Of course, the oil paintings do have to be photographed... with a digital camera.

Anyway, this is Eleanor, our Rhode Island Red.  And this is the posture I most often find her in, with her head down, digging for worms.  She's my favorite chicken to paint because I love those orange and red feathers.  Of our four chickens, she is really the quintessential barnyard hen.  She doesn't go in for silly little tricks or the other kinds of antics that our other chickens get into.  What she wants to do is get up in the morning, scratch around for food, and lay an egg. She lays lovely, dark brown eggs, and she acts like she rules the roost, although Dolley, one of our Araucanas, is also under the impression that she's in charge of the flock.

Thanks to whoever posted the suggestion about chicken paintings. I'll do a few more.

More Florists Going Green

I love hearing from florists who are working on ways to go green.  I've come to believe that the move toward sustainability in this industry is going to come from an army of individual florists--highly creative, artistic people who are personally committed to the environment and who have the flexibility and the entrepreneurial spirit to just make a move.

(Hey, y'all should form an organization!  Or at least get together and throw a party for yourselves.)

So today, please say hello to Floribunda Designs. Michelle Howell got her start in landscape design, which may explain why she got interested in selling eco-friendly flowers.  You can read about her approach to going green on her website. She's doing what many florists who have contacted me are doing:  She's buying flowers through Organic Bouquet's wholesale division and she's offering other VeriFlora-certified flowers (see a list of growers and suppliers here.) And once she's got that in place, what does she do?

She tells people.   She keeps a blog here (more about that in a minute) and she works with her local media, including bridal magazines and morning TV shows, to spread the word about how she's doing flowers in an eco-friendly way. And then she tells people that she told people by posting all the media coverage on her website.

What I see florists doing is undertaking a kind of three-step process to going green.  The first step is to get the flowers in the shop.  The second step is to tell people.  And the third step is to continuously improve and refine the first two steps. In other words, you don't have to go green all at once.  You might start with a line of eco-friendly tulips.  Get a little news coverage, start a little buzz, market an earth-friendly bouquet.   Then you may bring in some locally-grown organic flowers. Then you figure out a cool way to recycle, reuse, or reduce waste.  You keep telling people, and you keep making small, manageable changes.

So--way to go, Michelle.  I hope florists will keep sending me their stories of how they're going green. (See?  That's part of the "tell people" step.)

Oh, and there's an article in Florists' Review on going green. Check it out here.

And one last thing--about blogging.  A few florists have asked me about keeping a blog.    Without getting into too much technical detail, here's what I suggest:

• Use TypePad.  It's five bucks a month, and worth it.  (see the orange box in the right sidebar for a link.)  Without any HTML skils, you can create a blog that matches your website OR serves as your website if you don't have a website!  That's what I did with this blog.  It doesn't match my site perfectly, but it's close enough. If I had more HTML skills or wanted to pay somebody, I could have created a full HTML template that would have been completely integrated with my site.
• Use the "Pages"  feature to create static pages with your contact info,  directions to your shop, other info that doesn't change--if you don't have a website to refer people to.
• Use domain mapping to  either give the blog its own URL (like www.yourstore.com) if you don't have a website, or make it a subdomain of your existing URL (like www.blog.yourstore.com)
• Use the "Posts" feature to post quick photos of your beautiful flowers or whatever is happening in the store that seems fun and interesting.  Blog posts should be quick (unlike this one) and topical and aimed at getting people into your store or helping them to feel like they have a personal connection with you--that you're a real person they want to support.
• Use FeedBlitz's service (it's a TypePad widget) to allow people to "subscribe" to your blog and get your new posts by email.  This can serve as a kind of e-mail newsletter.