Decorate A Garden is Live

Decorate A Garden is now live and I’m over there posting and building the site. Would love for you to join me. Flowergardengirl.wordpress will stay online as many people link to this site for educational purposes.

Thank you, Come See Decorate A Garden

Thank you all for making the name Flowergardengirl so successful. And I’m still Flowergardengirl but the site name and location is Decorate A Garden. There will be no new posting to this site but it will remain live. I’m putting up this post so there will be pretty pictures on my home page when people do google searches and land here by chance. I want them to come see my new place too. So everyone stop on over and please do change your blogroll for me.

Ya’ll come see me at Decorate A Garden

Comments are turned off on this blog now.

Maybe you should garden?

I grew up in the community of Old Salem, North Carolina for a good part of my childhood. A great aunt helped to raise me and she lived there. I loved being at her house. Old Salem is filled with gardens both vegetable and ornamental. I use to roam freely and talk with the tenders of those gardens. It brought so much joy to my life that I decided I must garden when I finally had a plot of my own.

Old Salem has a rich history of gardening. Almost every house has always had a garden and they have been disciplined about tending to them. That tradition continues today and many of the residents of this restored community carry on with the same. Moravians, as those first residents were called, laid their gardens out in squares.

They were divided into four or six “squares” separated by grass walkways. Vegetables, herbs, and flowers were grown together, with fruit trees placed around the edges or at the rear of the lot.

I got use to the fresh apples from the orchards, eating fresh vegetables, and cutting bouquets for the dinner table. My Aunt Nana introduced me to everyone and many of the folks gave us fresh eggs and shared what they had harvested that day. Food never tasted so good. I wanted that for my family. I wanted to grow those kinds of gardens and smell those scents all day long.

It takes a lifetime to become such a skilled gardner and every year I try a little harder. Thank you Mary Ann Newcomer at Gardens of the Wild Wild West. She ask us to write __Why I Garden. So now you know…..She hosted a contest and this is my entry.

***Update!! Thank you Mary Ann!! I got an Honorable Mention and will be receiving a copy of  Hortus Miscellaneous. You can see the post of winners and other honorable mentions at

THIS POST on Mary Ann’s site. Thank you to Carol at May Dreams Gardens and  Dee at Red Dirt Ramblings for helping with the judging.

I welcome everyone to my new site at Decorate A Garden.com where I am currently posting and of course rebuilding. Hope to see you there!

Feel the rhythm of the butterfly wings, Monarch on Fur Balls

While composing the music for this piece, I tried to give you the viewer and listener— a feel for just who these dainty little characters really are. They are Mexican of course. They migrate from Mexico to Canada and we here in NC are right in their path. Lucky for me I grew Monkey Balls this year and they just love it. You can search my sidebar for Fur Balls and you’ll get all kinds of good info.

Do you feel the butterfly wings beating? Do you feel the grace and Mexican flavor in this arrangement I put together for you? I took the photos in August or September and they laid eggs which hatched and the caterpillars munched nicely then flew beautifully on their way as Monarchs. I was very proud of the whole process.

Created on a MacBook Pro using IMovie, Garage Band, Iphoto, Itunes and then uploaded to Youtube

‘Limelight’ Hydrangea study repost

This is the repost of my podcast on the ‘Limelight’ hydrangea study. For those who didn’t see earlier post, I’m having to repost my youtube videos as they were stripped of the audios and I’m repairing them here to my blog and at youtube…sorry for the double posting. Even though I’m rebuilding a new blog, this one will remain active because a lot of school children and others link to this blog for things just like this ‘Limelight’ video. I use to teach school and in particular biology—so I know how finding stuff like this can be—so I’m gonna reload for these folks. So just ignore me as I fix a few things here and there.

The new blog, Decorate A Garden is coming along nicely. Working fast to get it done for you and me.

Vlogging Up the Christmas Tree, Repost again

This is one of the videos that got deleted when my youtube account went haywire.  Well sweet Nan over at Gardening Gone Wild did an article on Getting Creative With Images and she was kind enough to reference my post where I talk about using the software– Gimp, a photo manipulating program. She also highlighted my vlogging and podcasting—so I just had to get cracking on getting the repairs to this wacky podcast.

James and Shirley will be thrilled cause it’s the third time I’ve bothered them with the link. I’ve had to upload this crazy video to youtube 3 times. Each time it takes about an howah as we say down here. I’m sorta beginning to think I’m ate up with myself. If youtube eats it this time–well it’s just gone. and ya’ll know what?? There are two strands of of lights out now on this dumb tree.

So this was the article from the original post and sorry but the comments from that first post got deleted. Life is not perfect so ya’ll get over it.—->>>>

Just for your entertainment. Mr D says nobody will stick this video out and I’m wondering too–but here you go. Part 2 will be on Wednesday. My kids are coming in this week and I want to have all the decorating done for them. I don’t get them very often so I want to make it special. I love having my kids home.

The Shirley I mention in the video is Shirley Bovshow from Eden Makers Blog. I just love her. And then there is the Mr. James A Sinclair who blogs at Blackpitts Garden. When I need to cheer Mr D up after an especially stressful day, I head over to Blackpitts. That dry humor matches Mr D’s step for step.

So sit back and laugh your fool heads off with me. This is a hoot. Be kind and remember my poor camera is broke and she’ll only video at the moment and not doing that very well but we’re giving it all she’s got.

Wanna Peak? Decorate A Garden

You can peak at Decorate A Garden today. Well I hope that link will work. But that is not the permanent URL for it. The permanent url is http://decorateagarden.com/ which is pointed at a blank wordpress blog at the moment. Flowergardengirl.org will also be pointed at Decorate A Garden. And Flowergardengirl.wordpress.com will be here just as it is but I won’t be posting to it much. I’m leaving it up cause it still gets a lot of attention from school children and those looking for pictures to use in projects. I’m  happy about that.

( The photo above is from a trip I took with my sweet daughter-in-law this weekend. We went to Mills  Herb Farm in Statesville, NC to make evergreen wreaths this past weekend. So I do get away from the computer every now and then. I’m gonna write about that fun trip in a few days.)

Soon as I get all the urls hooked up and set to go…..I’ll let you all know to add Decorate A Garden to your blogrolls. You will notice that I have moved you over to Decorate a Garden already cause I needed to see the site live. You just can’t work on it unless you see how it performs in real time.

There is so much to do. I don’t have a fraction of the ideas over there yet. There are more pages to post….As you can see, I’ve started a recipe page. There is also gonna be a birdhouse page . All kinds of stuff associate with Copper Top Cottage.

Now the reason you can’t bookmark my site yet is cause I’m just testing the site above but I want you to come on along for the fun. I’ve let you in on everything else and I was getting lonely over there all by myself. A few pages are open for comments but I have no clue if they actually will or not—we’ll just have to see won’t we.

The program Decorate A Garden is running on what is called IWeb and it’s on my MacBook Pro but I’m also looking at a program called Sandvox which is also running on my Mac–and I’ve built another Decorate a Garden on there too—I’ve got plenty of time to decide which one will be the final home for this new venture.

This really is taking a lot of time but I’m enjoying it. Ok, I’ve brought you up to speed…now let me go visit you and get a bit caught up socially.

Red Geraniums blooming in December and Superwoman

I can’t believe it’s December 1st and I’ve got geraniums blooming. I’ve also got gaillardia, ‘Snow Princess’ alyssum, daisies, ‘Quick Fire’ hydrangeas, pansies, verbena, ‘Diamond Frost’ euphorbia and a few others. This Saturday should take care of that as the first snowfall is expected. I ask Mr. D to surprise me with some good hot chocolate–I like surprises.

I am working hard on the new blog, Decorate A Garden.  Our new home is looking comfy. I can’t wait to show it to you. It is still looking like Spring before I can get it done. I spent all day today just learning page color gradients.

That means taking a background color and making it go from light to dark from any point on the page. I placed a jpeg over that and adjusted the weight of the jpeg so it would load faster. And…that took all day—for one page. I probably would be done by now if I wasn’t trying to make it so pretty or if I wasn’t such an idea person. It almost drives me nuts.

Every now and then I take a break from designing and make categories. Since I’m moving blog post one by one from this blog—I’ve decided to made a category just for hydrangeas–just for the new house—, and be more specific and do sub categories which means inventory as you go. Very time consuming but a wealth of information for school children and those looking for pictures which is my goal.

Kathy at Cold Climate Gardening gave me an excellent idea for my new garden clothing line which will come along some time in 2010-11. I was asking how I should display the clothes on my new blog–and she came up with a brilliant idea—now you’ll just have to stay tuned to find out.  I’ve known Kathy for quite awhile now. I’ve nicknamed her Superwoman. She can do most anything from cooking to website design.

She’s one of the first garden bloggers–EVER– but she’s so much more too. She is a genuine person and a joy to talk with. She’s perhaps the most helpful person I’ve ever met and has a very large family of equally smart children. When she doesn’t know an answer to something about the garden, cooking, the computer, or life–she’ll turn to one of her children and they’ll know right away—it’s just amazing how much she adds to our blog world on a daily basis and you probably don’t know it.

Please do stop by her blog and visit one of her many topics. See what books she has recommended or what plants she’s talking about today. I love everything about her. I’ve never seen her when she wasn’t wearing her Superwoman cape!