Martha's Flowers

The essential resource from Martha Stewart, with expert advice and lessons on gardening and making the most of your spectacular blooms Martha Stewart's lifelong love of flowers began at a young age, as she dug in and planted alongside her father in their family garden, growing healthy, beautiful blooms, every year. The indispensable lessons she learned then--and those she has since picked up from master gardeners--form the best practices she applies to her voluminous flower gardens today. For the first time, she compiles the wisdom of a lifetime spent gardening into a practical yet inspired book. Learn how and when to plant, nurture, and at the perfect time, cut from your garden. With lush blooms in hand, discover how to build stunning arrangements. Accompanied by beautiful photographs of displays in Martha's home, bursting with ideas, and covering every step from seed to vase, Martha's Flowers is a must-have handbook for flower gardeners and enthusiasts of all skill levels.

Auteur

MARTHA STEWART is America's most trusted lifestyle expert and teacher and the author of more than 80 books on cooking, entertaining, crafts, homekeeping, gardening, weddings, and decorating.

KEVIN SHARKEY, Executive Director of Design at Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, helped found the decorating and floral design voice of Martha Stewart Living magazine, working alongside Martha for 22 years.

Échantillon de lecture
Introduction
AS I WRITE THIS, I AM IN THE PROCESS OF planning my next garden. It will be my seventh garden, and I’ve been collecting images in my head, tear sheets in folders, and names of varieties of trees, shrubs, plants, and flowers that I think will be appropriate in this new and exciting landscape. And I’ve tried to imagine if this time will be any different from when I designed and dug (and double dug), then planted my very first, and very modest, garden in front of our tiny, white clapboard single-story cottage in the Berkshire mountains of Massachusetts.
 
It was my very own garden, where I was free from my father’s beautifully modulated instructor’s voice telling me what to do, and how to do it, in his backyard garden. Here, I was relaxed and confident that I could plant a noteworthy, productive garden. At that time, my guidance came from my father, of course, but also from some wonderful books and places that influenced me profoundly: the writings of Vita Sackville-West, Gertrude Jekyll, and Helena Rutherfurd Ely, and the historic gardens that I loved visiting, including Monticello, Mount Vernon, the Mission House in nearby Stockbridge, and Old Sturbridge Village. Using a simple geometric plan, I laid out a front-path garden, which captured the sunlight for most of the day. Recycled bricks, carefully cleaned of all old rubble and cement, were laid in walks of stone dust and edged in more bricks laid on the diagonal. I discovered early on the beauty and efficacy
of perennial planting, and most of the flowers there, in that small, pretty garden, were indeed perennials, interspersed with some herbs and very few annuals.
 
My most vivid memories of that garden were the hours spent tending the beds, singing to my young child, Alexis, making up fairy-tale-like stories about the flowers, reiterating the common as well as Latin names so that they are still ingrained not only in my head but also in hers. I was so proud when she could recite the flower names to my friends, pointing out her favorite campanula, digitalis, or Papaver orientalis.
 
The second, and the one that has been so instrumental in my subsequent development as a serious gardener, was the two-acre garden I designed and planted in Westport, Connecticut, on a perfect plot of south-facing land, and known as Turkey Hill. What began as two acres grew to four, and then in an orderly fashion to six as neighboring properties became available for purchase. Surrounding at first the 1805 farmhouse, which also played an important part in my entrepreneurial development, these gardens were my true testing ground, my “college education” for growing and experimenting, and my inspiration for putting pen to paper and writing books about subjects I loved. My first gardening book, Martha Stewart’s Gardening: Month by Month, appeared in 1991. In that book, I described the challenges and rewards of planting and growing not only flowers but also trees and vegetables and shrubs. In the beginning, I did most of the gardening myself, choosing the plant material, planning the layouts of the beds, placing the young trees in appropriate places, and weeding, fertilizing, watering,
and grooming. I found that a half acre was doable, an acre not, and I hired my first two gardeners. They were not trained horticulturists, but they were very hardworking and each had a wonderful affinity for plants and their care. As my vision for the place expanded, they scurried to keep up, sometimes enlisting a brother or cousin to help. During this time, I traveled quite frequently to Europe and Asia, where I visited as many gardens as I could. My husband was a publisher, and he was working on Visions
of Paradise, an extraordinary volume about Europe’s most beautiful gardens. We traveled to England, France, and Italy to see with our own eyes the gardens so faithfully displayed in the photographs. It was on this trip that I started to understand the true nature of a real gardener, and the true worth of great garden and landscape design. I discovered the most famous landscape architects—in England, the Humphry Reptons, the William Kents, the Capability Browns; and in France, the René de Girardins, the
André Le Nôtres, and the André Mollets. I bought books devoted to their works, and read with great interest why this and not that! I was even very influenced by Claude Monet after several visits to Giverny, and my flower garden emulated those gardens in intensity of color and types of flowers.
 
At Turkey Hill I made plenty of mistakes, but none that could not be remedied. I learned that gardening was enjoyment and sacrifice, that planting required inordinate patience and fortitude, and that instant gratification provided by planting large trees and established plants could be tempered with patience and smaller specimens, ultimately with better results.
 
While at Turkey Hill I purchased my third garden, Lily Pond, a one-acre parcel of land surrounding a large shingle-style nineteenth-century home on a beautiful tree–lined avenue in the village of East Hampton, Long Island. The climate, tempered by the proximity to the sea and the milder winters, was excellent for the cultivation of roses, and I was determined to grow a large assortment of old-world varieties—shrubs as well as climbers. I began a yearlong search for as many roses as I could find. Fortunately, there existed several excellent growers in the United States and Canada, and I bought about six hundred bushes, the bare roots of which were delivered by post. For twenty-five years those bushes grew to produce very strong and beautiful blooms. The gardens perfumed the surrounding areas during June and July, and I was thrilled with the results. I studied the care and maintenance of roses, consulted great rosarians, and devised my own methods for successfully growing these amazing plants. We often featured those gardens in the pages of Martha Stewart Living. When the roses finally reached maturity, and began to decline from robust shrubs, I dug them all up and moved them to my farm in Katonah, a hamlet of Bedford, New York, hoping that a drastic change in climate and soil conditions might revive them. Happily, I can now report that they are thriving.
 
For a brief moment in time, I owned about forty-five acres in Greenfield Hill, Fairfield, Connecticut. I truly believed…