Harvesting Inspiration, a Guest Post by Sarah Stewart Taylor

RHYS BOWEN:  So many good books coming out around this time! Not only are we celebrating my release and Lucy's next week, but several good friends of the Reds also have new books out. I'm happy to be hosting Sarah Stewart Taylor today, calebrating her new book HUNTER'S HEART RIDGE. And Sarah is here to share about a subject close to my own heart: flowers.  I love flowers. When I go to the farmer's market to buy beans and plums I often return with a bunch of freshly cut flowers as well. I'd love to have an English garden full of scents and blooms but alas I live on a hill where deer wander freely and devour anything that isn't oleander. But I'm living vicariously through Sarah's flowers today!

SARAH STEWART TAYLOR:

 While harvesting flowers in my cut flower garden this morning, I thought to myself, “Alice Bellows would be so proud of my scabiosa.”

Alice Bellows is not a real person. She is a character in my series of novels set in 1960s rural Vermont. In the series starter, Agony Hill, Alice, who has returned to her hometown to live after the suspicious death of her CIA-connected husband and a lifetime of espionage adventures of her own, makes flower arrangements for a town celebration, gives arrangements to friends, and spends hours upon hours in the peace of her meticulously-designed and well-tended gardens.

At some point over the last couple of years, I realized that my interest in flowers and Alice’s had begun to flow together so that I wasn’t sure where one started and the other ended. Like Alice, I became absolutely obsessed with growing cut flowers for bouquets.

I’ve always loved growing things. We have a perennial garden, planted by my late mother-in-law, at our farm that I have fun caring for, and I have often planted sunflowers or zinnias and enjoyed harvesting the blooms. But two years ago, after one too many visits to Floret Flower Farm’s Instagram account, I realized that I wanted to try growing cut flowers myself and that I wanted to learn how to arrange them.

There’s something about being able to present a friend or family member who is celebrating or going through something difficult with a glorious arrangement of home-grown flowers. Flowers, lovely but short-lived, force us to slow down and notice the sublime, to revel in the miracle of nature’s wildly varied colors and shapes.

So, last summer, I started preparing the beds and grew a few varieties of zinnias and cosmos. Over the winter, I read and researched and ordered way too many seeds. When my husband gave me a seed-starting set up, complete with grow lights, my new hobby began to bloom, so to speak.

While snow blanketed the ground outside my windows, I started about twenty varieties of cut flowers from seed: snapdragons, scabiosa, yarrow, strawflower, feverfew, veronica, celosia, gomphrena, zinnias, cosmos, and more. Every day I would check the little seedlings, watering them, turning them to the lights, and dreaming about the day they would finally reach maturity.

I can’t tell you how much joy it has given me to watch them grow, first inside and then out in my garden. In so many ways, cut flower gardening is an excellent antidote to the ups and downs of writing and publishing. Weeding and watering give me a great excuse to get up from the computer and when my words don’t feel particularly well-composed or beautiful, I can create order and art with the flowers. I don’t know exactly where I’m going with this passion; I’m hoping to have a farmstand and sell bouquets at some point, but I have a lot to learn before that will be possible. 

Doing the work of growing all of these flowers has helped me to understand Alice better too. After the danger and uncertainty of her married life, she has found peace and satisfaction in her gardens. There is also a secret in her past that draws her to her beds and borders and, since these are mystery novels, in Agony Hill and its follow up, Hunter‘s Heart Ridge, which comes out August 5th, Alice begins to suspect that her past in the intelligence world is not completely in the past. 

Whatever happens to her though, I know she’ll keep growing flowers and I’ll be gardening and arranging right alongside her.

Have you ever shared a hobby with a fictional character?

SARAH STEWART TAYLOR is the author of the Sweeney St. George series, set in New England, the Maggie D’arcy mysteries, set in Ireland and on Long Island, and Agony Hill and Hunter’s Heart Ridge, set in rural Vermont in the 1960s.

 Sarah has been nominated for an Agatha Award, the Dashiell Hammett Prize, and the MWA Sue Grafton Memorial Award and her mysteries have appeared on numerous Best of the Year lists. A former journalist and teacher, she writes and lives with her family on a farm in Vermont where they raise sheep and grow blueberries. You can learn more about her at www.SarahStewartTaylor.com. Visit her on Instagram and Facebook to see more of her flowers!