2 MILLION BLOSSOMS The roses and my little plum tree get hit the hardest. Last


year I was tempted to give up on roses altogether. They grew beautifully in my old garden, but the harsh Wisconsin winters and the Japanese beetles are a challenge here. I take one more deep breath of rose and don’t let my thoughts linger on problems still to come. My colander is brim full, but there are a few more things to harvest. I kneel on the bark mulch between two of my raised beds and study the radishes. Are there any ready yet? I can just see the tops of the red roots sticking out of the soil. I gently wiggle one from the ground. It’s a little small, but perfect. I pull a few more. Some are the round red Cherry Belle variety. A few others are the classic red and white oblong French Breakfast type. I ease a few carrots from the ground as well. I’m growing Little Finger carrots this year. They’re small, too, but I’m impatient to taste them. I’m impatient to taste the tomatoes, too, but they’ll probably need another month to ripen. I never plant my tomato seeds early enough. I’m wary of late frosts and don’t want the seedlings to get leggy inside while they wait to be planted in my garden. Tomatoes are my favorite summer food. They’re not always easy to grow here. Blight runs rampant, some years worse than others. I grow my tomatoes in pots with fresh soil and try to choose resistant varieties. So far the plants look healthy.


Above: Mixing just three colors of paint produces nearly unlimited variations of color. Below left: My garden is a colorful mix of herbs, flowers, vegetables, and fruits. Right: Even the most common garden plants like this purple petunia are beautiful painting subjects.


I might lean toward the practical in my choice of


tomatoes, but often I choose plants simply because I want to paint them. While my garden nourishes our bodies–my husband and I eat from it nearly every day–it also feeds my creativity. My art is inspired by the plants I grow. Winters can be hard, my garden buried under snow, but in summer I can barely keep up with all I want to paint. Although I’m collecting for dinner, surrounded by


 plant calls for my attention. The red dahlias. The tricolor sage. The rainbow of zinnias. Tomorrow morning I’ll come back with my colander and scissors. Not for dinner, but  studio and arrange them in bottles, vases, and jars. The start of every painting is a thrill. I open all my paint


   this warm red–it pools from my brush onto the palette. Now some yellow to change the hue. Sometimes I’ll consult my sketchbook swatch collections when matching colors, but usually I work by instinct. The magic of paint and water. I test the colors on scraps of paper until they look right. While I wait for my paint to dry (working with dry paint gives me deeper color) I sketch out compositions in my sketchbook. Once I’m happy with a design, I lightly sketch it onto watercolor paper. Only then do I begin to paint. I snap back from my painting reverie. Dinner awaits. I cut a few peapods from the vines climbing their trellis.


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