Friday, January 2, 2009

Gardening and taxes......

It's that time of the year. You can always count on receiving IRS tax forms and gardening catalogs in the days following Christmas. Both point toward spring deadlines, but perusing through the catalogs is a lot more fun. In the cold and overcast days of January, it's nice to sit down with paper and pencil and, with the catalogs, plan your spring garden and dream about warm, sunny days. I've done my share of that, as did my father and his mother before me. Below is a drawing I found stuck away in some of my grandmother's gardening magazines and clippings. Pearl Cofield Robinson loved her flower gardens, and irises were among her favorite flowers. Her planting diagram came with a bonus - it was written on the back of my grandfather's stationery from his service on the Board of Supervisors, otherwise I would never have seen his letterhead. The advertisement came from one of her gardening magazines published in 1965.


2 comments:

Charley "Apple" Grabowski said...

My tax bill came but the garden catalogs are late. I will spend the next four months doodeling on graph paper with visions of the perfect summer garden. Does Pearl's garden still exist in some form? Some of my favorite plants are passalongs from long gone gardens.

Mona Robinson Mills said...

Apple, my grandmother died in 1969 and after my father's death in 2005, my mother sold the homeplace. There wasn't much left to passalong in the way of plants, but I do have some old flowerpots and urns that Pearl had and they are among my prize possessions.