Got a bunch of nasturtiums at the Liberty Sunset nursery, and then a lime-aid from Steve's Keylime Pie. Two of the best reasons to visit pier 41 in RedHook.

which of these is not like the other?

Roses and kittens... this is what I'm going to stick to in this blog. No more titles that mention s$x and prof#nity. The number of hits this blog got after that post was ridiculous. I quadrupled my readership the easy way...

Roses are blooming all over the city, its ridiculous! All types! Rose of Sharon on the west side highway, roses in the botanical gardens, roses even in Red Hook!! Like the bush above...Aaron and I stopped...well we stopped to smell the roses on a recent bike ride. This bush is really a treasure - go see it on Conover and King St. I'm going there right now actually. The roses smell like nothing your ever smelled. Like citrus fruit and s#x!!!!

[The bottom roses are from Garden Valley in sunny California. The kitten is from US Evergreen, a vendor at the flower market that specializes in flowering branches and foliage.]

Wedding at the Foundry this past weekend. Check out more photos at me ole flickr page.
We're working upstate today. Eric is "working" on his VIP's (very important projects) which today includes Jewel Quest; a tetris-like game fashioned after Indiana Jones.

***

In other news I've been thinking about the Hadron Super Collider a lot lately, the particle accelerator international scientists are building underground in Switzerland. Starting in June it will smash particles together at nearly the speed of light. Here's a view of the scientists working inside (!):

A lot of critics are raving about the potential it has of a.) creating mini-black holes and/or b.) creating Strangelets, hypothetical particles which if unleashed would quickly turn the earth itself into a smoldering coal of quark. Anything apocalyptic is really my cup of tea. Really good Studio 360 podcast on the topic here.

We spent today manning a soap booth at the Brooklyn Flea. So hot, no tent. We have an e-z up tent in the truck, but unloading this morning Eric and I looked at each other and shrugged...tents are for pussy's!
Not so. By 2 pm I was feeling delirious and shaken from the sun. I spent the rest of the day cowering under a rain umbrella duck-taped to a folding chair. Now I can't decide if I feel sick from too much water (over-hydration is real) or not enough. Once a hypochondriac, always a hypochondriac.

We're heading to dinner now ... then I'm going home to sleep for 3 days. The wedding Friday was really draining (but fantastic). I'll share those pics soon -- in the meantime you can see some other photos from the Wave Hill wedding on Didi's blog Little Winter Bride. Love her style. Also love that she was a winter bride. We need more winter wedding enthusiasts...

Happy memorial day folks...
Sarah

vacant sex scenes and profanity.

[peonies, scented geranium, goosenecks, lisianthus, dogwood, and a cockscomb tucked in there.]

I'll be incommunicado for the next few days as we're prepping a big wedding...I just watched The Age of Innocence as per Mousey's suggestion. When it was almost over Aaron shoved the box in front of me and said, "Where are the sex scenes?!? On the back of the box they [Michelle Pfeiffer and Daniel Day Luis] are naked!" False advertising. Consider yourself forewarned.

***

This is a picture of some old mossy branch in our shop right now. It's called mossy branch because thats what flower vendors want to call it. Flower vendors at the 28th street market are 99% men. One particular vendor is run by a few men who closely remind me of ... well lets say they have names like Don and Chubbs. Recently I was in this particular vendor's space while he was on the phone with a client:

"What do I have right now? Well I got some hydge [hydrangea], Jersey nuncs [ranuncula] ... but let me tell you ... what I really got is peonies....[he quickly eyes the 45 odd boxes of Carolina peonies stacked up]....f**kin' peonies."

I stood there staring at him chewing his cigar. Wow. In my floral world of women and ... more women ... this man has become my hero. I'm going to start answering our phone with the F word.

This peony variety is called Paula Fey.

Cake topper below for a 'sunset colored' wedding. Baked makes some pretty exquisite wedding cakes. For all those of you who don't know Red Hook, they are across the street from us and give us a good amount of cake-topping business. We reciprocate in cookie purchases. I guess between the two of us we average 3 cookies per week. Maybe 4. That is approximately 294 cookies since we opened. Or about $600 in cookies. Oh my God.

5 of the best things that ever happened to me.

1. discovering how good whole milk tastes.
1.5 realizing you can freeze cookie dough to make a warm cookie when you want one.
2. finding this beaded necklace which I now wear everyday.
3. trusting homeopathy
4. discovering a small trampoline in the basement
5. Stevie Nicks

Spyria saved the day with these centerpieces from Saturday's wedding. I had been planning on using dogwood, but the suckers just wouldn't force open soon enough. This worked out much better, the spyria served as a great anchor for the peonies and smaller flowers.
We're off to stimulate the economy today. Wishing you a day of Emmy Lou Harris and a pistachio ice cream cone.

Sarah

All I did was ask

The weather yesterday was idyllic for the wedding we worked on at Wave Hill. I will post more photos tomorrow. We were escorted around in a GOLF CART folks!!! VIP coming through at 15 mph! I love it there ... and actually I spoke to some of the staff and they said it was OK and "like totally cool" for me to move in. Go figure. So I'm sad to say I will be leaving Red Hook to take up residence at the Wave Hill Mansion. I will miss the unusual litter, the methadonians, and people stealing herbs right out of my container garden. I will also miss "Cracky," the resident outsider artist and the Grand Opening of Ikea on June 18th. Oh well.


P.S. I'm going to admit that Sofie B. Hawkins Damn, I Wish I Was Your Lover just came on the radio and I am sort of enjoying it right now.

the great cake-caper, plus a scene from wedding prep.

I am in the middle of prep for a great wedding tomorrow...and up in the front of the shop we're working on a photoshoot for some amazing looking organic cakes by Sarah Magid.

Needless to say things are a bit crammed in here. Between me and me-using-the-ladies-room is an enormous bale of Spyria and 150 Shirley Temple Peonies.

I'll post again this weekend with some images of flowers...have you dug out any of your old Kate Bush albums? Why not??

Also, Eric has informed me he wants to start posting to the blog, so I guess you could look forward to that.

Sarah

[Red Charm Peonies from today]

I keep making the same mistake of letting 2, 3 months elapse between visits to yoga class. When the new teacher asks; "Do you have a regular practice?" I hesitate, and then spend class proud of myself that I can still get my foot behind my head. (Well not really). This, my friends, comes with obvious consequences...such as the inability to turn ones head to the left.

Also, I scratched the truck today on a garbage can parallel parking. There was a time when I was a good driver. At 16 I finagled my way down Broadway in a Dodge Daytona (a bullet!) determined to find the ultimate prom dress, snagging a parking spot in midtown without a care. At 20 I would drive my soft-top Wrangler (the equivalent of a pup-tent on wheels) ten hours from Virginia Tech to NYC like it was nothing. Now I drive to Cobble Hill like an old lady, hunched over the wheel, slowing down at green lights - distracted even by the ho-hum fashions of the neighborhood. I get lots of honking horns and a healthy array of obscenities yelled at me followed by the necessary "LADY!"

Lastly, the average Ritter SPORT has 600 calories. Which means, you could eat one in place of a meal. I just did.

poppies from the archives.

Decompressing today...the weekend went swimmingly; we sold out of flowers around 4pm yesterday and managed to get rid of some junk with a somewhat impromptu sidewalk sale.


Fixed supper of lamb chops with rosemary aioli and oven fries for a lovely celebratory dinner with Mom. Talked about politics like only women can - without raised voices or high blood pressure. Now I'm taking your recommendations and enjoying some ridiculous gunpowder tea with rose petals in it and listening to Kate Bush Hounds of Love. My head feels empty, and I realize how boring this post is as I type...

I'm working on getting details together for a wedding this weekend at Wave Hill. I took a trip up there on Saturday to have a look around the grounds and mansion.

A Wisteria growing up the side of the house was a sight for sore eyes. I am smitten with Wisteria this year, I can sniff it out anywhere; we mingle and I flirt with the idea of someday growing my own. It's a labor of love, these vines. They often take several years to flower...but the smell when they do is divine! It is similar to lilac but deeper and mustier.


And ah to tinker in here...the gardener's workshop at Wave Hill..

Some more purple material from today. Sunday is mothers day; mothers like purple. Susan is coming down to work the shop with me - I'm really excited about that.

Otherwise it's been a hell of a day. I lost expensive flowers, threw a tantrum for Eric's benefit, walked the streets of Manhattan in tears, and found a destitute wet kitten I couldn't save. So I holed up in my office and spent a half hour therapeutically watching Fleetwood Mac videos on YouTube - still didn't feel better. So I'm going home to douse myself in french patchouli, wear all my silk at once, and raid Aaron's record collection.

See you tomorrow,
Sarah

Lilacs, roses, hyacinths, alium, etc.
Some of our loot from the market this morning. I'll post more picture later this afternoon when I get myself together here...

the travelers.

****
I'll be back tomorrow with flower pictures. We're picking up material in the morning for Mother's Day orders. Let me know if there is anything in particular you fancy.

Fodder for procrastination: (please if nothing else, watch the "BEE")
http://www.sundancechannel.com/greenporno/

I went to Gowanus nursery last week and got some incredible plants which you see below. Inspired recenctly by plants more so then by flowers, I have been testing cuttings and incoporating them into bouquets and arrangments.


I used varigated Jacob's ladder in this one. Nice right? But it seems I also have a infestation of Aphids...this happens every year and I fight them off using different methods - the dunk, the soapy solution, the expensive organic pesticide ($8 a bottle!). It takes a few weeks usually to get them under control...because they spread so quickly. And remember these little heirloom tomato seedlings I got going on?


More precious than gold (well, silver maybe) and suddenly I've become like a mother protecting her cubs. I've segregated all new plants to the back yard and wear hazmat gloves when traveling between the green zone and the infected area.

Please tell me what is your best method for keeping a container garden aphid free???

from pickles to the blog-o-sphere and beyond. and a wedding.

Another wedding under our belts and we march onward!

[FLORIST - say the word to yourself right now. Sounds better with a New Jersey accent doesn't it?...kind of like; "Flaw-rust"]

These flowers were for a wedding at Frankies 457, as I've mentioned before, one of my favorite venues. I found peonies from North Carolina this week (the first east coasters of the season) so we went heavy on the peonies - also mixing in ranuncula, red tip, freesia...those montreux tulips and allium.

For the table flowers we made small arrangements in old short ball jars and placed one at each place setting going down the long table. This is boring to talk about so you can just look at more pictures here.




Alright folks, Susan, the great matriarch of Saipua is now a blogger.
Let me share the email she sent a week ago:

"If you want to see what I've been up to this afternoon...check out my blog:
http://frenchpickles.blogspot.com/"

We'd been talking about pickling vegetables. Cauliflower to be specific. She recalled a recipe that involved grinding many vegetables into a relish of sorts...I'll let you figure the rest out.