Sigh. I have to admit, I was so in love with this pretty piece. It actually made me a little sad to hand it off to the client. And now I can’t stop gazing at the photo. It’s the wallpaper on my desktop.

I think part of the reason I love this one so much is that to me it really says San Francisco. I grew up here, and so there are certain plants that grow well and abundantly in the area that evoke some deep nostalgia in me.

Arbutus (”strawberry tree”), the branch with the little white buds and the red and yellow dangling fruits, is a common street tree around here. When I was a kid my friends and I used to stand at the school bus stop and pelt each other with the fruits.

We had hydrangeas in our backyard. They were my mother’s pride; she’s not a huge gardener, but she loved those hydrangeas, and now, wouldn’t you know it, despite my best efforts to develop my own tastes, I love hydrangeas too. Certain varieties just love it here in our mild climate. These particular ones were grown in misty Half Moon Bay.

Those bright magenta flowers aren’t something I remember from my childhood, but they sure are everywhere in San Francisco now. They’re a succulent, calandrinia, and they’re growing all up and down Guerrero Street, in a planting designed by Flora. There are also a few of them growing in our little sidewalk garden in front of the nursery, so I actually snipped these and added them at the last minute, to pick up the bright purple of the heather. I love the way those magenta flowers hover over the greenery. Flora said she thought they looked like butterflies landing on it.

I guess the point I’m trying to make here is that there’s a particular beauty to flowers and plants grown locally and in season. Their beauty is soul-stirring, because it evokes the actual natural world. Giant, picture-perfect roses flown in from Brazil, or stargazer lilies grown in a Dutch hothouse, or even genetically modified gerberas in Skittles colors, just somehow seem to me to have very little to do with nature. Which doesn’t mean they’re not pretty—but it may mean, for some of us, that they just don’t have the same emotional pull.

Personally, I also have a hard time enjoying more “traditional” cut flowers these days, now that I’m more aware of their environmental impact. At our workshop last weekend, Jim shared his experience of opening boxes of Brazilian roses for events and finding himself enveloped not in the flowers’ own perfume, but in a cloud of pesticide fumes. Yuck. Now it’s hard for me to look at a bunch of supermarket roses and appreciate their beauty without thinking of that story.

There are international growers, of course, that are adopting organic practices and seeking environmentally responsible solutions. Websites like Organic Bouquet do a great service in bringing business to these farms. But there’s still something more appealing about a locally grown, low-impact bouquet, and it’s not just the reduced carbon footprint.

Saul and I try to eat seasonal, locally grown food, not just because it’s a responsible thing to do, but because it often tastes better. The potatoes that come in our CSA box are seriously the earthiest, most velvety little things you’ve ever tasted. The mint cut from our own garden is ten times more fragrant and flavorful than the kind that comes in the plastic shell at Safeway. And the principle, with flowers, is the same: There’s nothing quite like the wild beauty of a fresh-from-the-garden bouquet.

So there’s my little spiel about locally grown flowers. Thanks for listening. I’ll be back next week to report from the trenches as I work on the Thanksgiving centerpieces. There’s still time to order (in our new web shop!) if you haven’t yet… all California-grown flowers, many of them from our very own farms. I might even get to sneak a few snips from the nursery garden again, if I’m lucky. Can’t wait!

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