The Flowers are Naughty

I was typing up my grandma's memoirs last year, and she told the cutest story about my youngest sister, Lexi. Sometimes, when Grams would baby-sit Lex, they would be out in the garden, weeding and such, and they would sing the Primary song, "In the Leafy Treetops." There is a verse in that song that goes:

In my mother's garden,
The flowers are nodding.
How do you do? they say,
How do you do today?
In my mother's garden,
The flowers are nodding.

Lexi thought it said, "In my mother's garden, the flowers are naughty." Soooo cute. I love that story. Grandma had the best memory for stories like that. I have to write stories like that down, or they are gone forever.

Anyways, this summer was the first summer that I have ever had a flower garden. It's not much, because I have limited fundage, but my mom helped me a lot in that department, bless her heart. And I was so proud of my flowers - I took lots of pictures. Flowers just make me so happy. My mom said, and I concur, "Flowers just make life worth living." When I'm having a hard day, all I have to do is look at my flowers, and I feel a little bit better about life.

Here are my two dianthas. They survived last summer, which was so hot. Not only that, but they didn't get watered all summer, because the previous owner moved at the beginning of the summer, and we didn't move in until the end of summer. This year, they have been blooming and blooming and so happy:

These are some annuals I planted this year - African daisies. They close up at night and open up in the day. They are so beautiful. I love that their centers are purple:

These are some more annuals. They're called "lavenders," but I don't think they are lavender, the nice-smelling kinds. They are really interesting. Half of them have continued blooming and being very pretty all summer, but half of them only bloomed once, and then looked like weird cacti without the thorns. Really ugly. I just barely pulled the cacti-looking ones out. I'd rather have bare spots on the ground than these weird bare cacti things. I'm not doing these again next year, no matter how much I like purple. I'll just have to find a different purple flower:

And I can't take credit for this next one. During the week after I had Micah, I was so sick, and this elderly lady in my ward, Enid, brought some food over. The next week, I still hadn't returned her dishes, or anyone else's, for that matter, because I was so overwhelmed and tired and sick, and she came over and brought me this huge vase just overflowing with lilacs, my favorite flower of all time. And then she took all the dishes back to all of their owners. This lady is, like, in her eighties, and she walks so slowly and carefully and hunched over, yet she did that service for me, and it meant so much to me. Even though there are decades and decades of difference in our ages, I count her as one of my dear friends in this ward. The gorgeous lilacs:

I have got to plant some lilacs next year. I think I want to put them on the east side of my house, which is absolutely bare.