Muncie Times, Muncie, Delaware County, 23 September 2010 — Page 12

Page 12 • The Muncie Times • September 23, 2010

My love for flowers

By Otee Stills When my love for plants and flowers started I can’t remember. My parents, when I was young and growing up, always had a large vegetable garden and I was exposed to watching plants and flowers growing early, but my love for floweres came later. Watching a beautiful bloom come to plant is to me such a miracle and the colors and shapes have always fascinated me. I find it also such a fascination to see the shapes and beautiful colors of flowers. I love all flowers now but I love perennials best because ther is less care required since they do not have to be lifted in the fall and replanted in the spring. I love all three seasons Spring, Summer, and Fall but the late summer, the early fall flowers seem

Otee Stills

to really show color and brighness best. By late summer annual plants have started shutting down, spring plants are long gone and lawns are also shutting down and turning brown (for lack of rain in some instances). This is the time fall floweres make a beautiful showing and I love to see them knowing true fall is not far away.

My variegated Marigolds and solid yellow ones are so bright and colorful now. I also like plants that bloom more than once in the season such as Reblooming Day Lilies and Irises and ever bearing roses such as Knockout Roses. There is no special color theme in my flower beds - only color. Neither did I limit my flower bed to only certain kinds of plants. I love flowers and I love color but having a color theme sometimes does make a beautiful showing so in my patio pots, my color theme in the past spring was pink. I changed this year to three colors but next

year I will go back to pink. I feel the one color in the small pots made a better showing. I am an outdoors person and working with my plants seems to be a great stress releaser for me. I sing, pray, talk to the plants about current events and complain about the economy and wonder why they don’t ask me me how to fix it. But, most of the time I fuss with the weeds. The weeds I feel are not listening to me... they keep coming! They make my flower gardens look like no one cares about the flowers but I love my flowers! Mrs. Stills is the winner of many flower contest.