Flower Hunt

I have been trying to find out how to grow Chrysanthemums, not the scrubby bushy mums that are available at every plant seller each fall but the gorgeous kind that photographers take photos of and come in your bouquet of flowers. I can't imagine Mrs Miniver arranging the bushy kind of flowers can you?

Not These,
but these,
and these,
You would think it would be fairly straight forward but I am having a very hard time. I can't find anyone on-line or in real life or in print who can tell me where to get and how to grow the pretty kinds. The Portland Chrysanthemum Society is playing hard to get but I am going to be persistent.

I just named my house Starlings and chrysanthemums will grow at Starlings.

Welcome October

I love October and since I am busy with wedding preparations I leave you with the wisdom of Mrs Miniver:

"It was lovely, thought Mrs. Miniver, nodding good-bye to the flower-woman and carrying her big sheaf of chrysanthemums down the street with a kind of ceremonious joy, as though it were a cornucopia; it was lovely, this settling down again, this tidying away of the summer into its box, this taking up of the thread of one's life where the holidays (irrelevant interlude) had made one drop it.... She unwrapped the chrysanthemums and arranged them in a square glass jar, between herself and the light, so that the sun shone through them. They were the big mop-headed kind, burgundy-coloured, with curled petals; their beauty was noble, architectural; and as for their scent, she thought as she buried her nose in the nearest of them, it was a pure distillation of her mood, a quintessence of all that she found gay and intoxicating and astringent about the weather, the circumstances, her own age and the season of the year. Oh, yes, October certainly suited her best. For the ancients, as she had inescapably learnt at school, it had been the eighth month; nowadays, officially, it was the tenth: but for her it was always the first, the real New Year. That laborious affair in January was nothing but a name."

From "Mrs. Miniver by Jan Struthers.