A Fragrance Garden: Floresta Fragrant Gardens
(Page 3 of 3)
December/January 1994
By Portia Meares
We were invited inside for tea, and we discovered that her house displays the same love of color and fragrance so evident in the garden. During her years as a floral designer, Olive collected magnificent urns, antique vases, elegant china bowls, old baskets, bibelots, Victorian picture frames, and hand-painted lamps, which are as carefully placed throughout the house as the urns and statuary in her garden. Each room highlights a different color theme. In a lavender room, for example, a corner table holds a bowl filled with potpourri made of lavender flowers and topped with a single purple dried blossom such as a pansy or cosmos. Beside the bowl are pictures in frames that pick up the lavender color, a lavender wand, a lamp, perhaps a book open to an illustration that complements the scheme. Each corner of each room presents such a delightful vignette, and both dried and fresh floral arrangements abound.
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In the bedrooms, small rocking chairs hold pastel knitted or crocheted afghans and dolls, some of the latter with book in hand. Doorknobs hold ribbon-tied bags of herbs. Ribbons everywhere add a finishing touch, giving the rooms a Victorian feeling, very English and nostalgic. One of the men in our group commented, “This is clutter I could live with.”
Examples of Olive’s handiwork and garden bounty can be seen all through the house, but nowhere more obviously than in the tiny kitchen. Brown-and-white-checked gingham lines a wall of open shelves filled with herb vinegars, chutneys and preserves, jewel-colored jellies—cranberry, rowanberry, elderberry—and other culinary delights. Old copper pans decorate the walls. In this small space, Olive had prepared an elegant English high tea for us with sweets featuring ingredients from her garden. We stood in her living room, surrounded by her treasures, sipping and nibbling and experiencing the richness.
Portia Meares of Wolftown, Virginia, a long-time herbalist and author, is founder and former editor of the bimonthly magazine The Business of Herbs.
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