Of Worms and Wings and Other Sacred, Ordinary Things

Hello, my friends!  Below I have posted the transcript of a talk I gave this past weekend at a celebration of Emily Dickinson's poetry and gardens.  The event was hosted by the Powow River Poets at the beautiful Old South Church in Newburyport, Massachusetts.  At the end of the day, some folks asked if I'd be willing to share the transcript, and I thought posting it here on the blog might be the easiest way to do just that.  Those of you who read my blog regularly may recognize a few lines here from a post I wrote over the summer as I was drafting this talk.  I've included a few of my photos from past posts here with the talk, too.  Again, if you've read my blog for a while, and you know about my passion for gardens, fields, and woods, you'll immediately understand my love for Emily Dickinson.


Of Worms and Wings and Other Sacred, Ordinary Things

Thank you so much.  I want to say a special word of thanks to the Powow River Poets for this wonderful celebration of Emily Dickinson’s poetry and gardens.   I can’t think of a better way to spend a Saturday--especially an October Saturday--and you’ll see why in just a bit.

I should begin by saying that I’m not an Emily Dickinson expert.  I’m simply a devoted fan, and I have been ever since I was a kid in the 1970’s.  Back when I was about 9 or 10, I had two summertime obsessions.  They weren’t obsessions that I shared with my friends or anyone else.  These were mine alone.

The first was one that I’m guessing many of you also had and probably still have; I read every single thing I could get my hands on. Magazines, books, cereal boxes—if it had words, I read it.  And somewhere in all that reading, I stumbled upon a collection of verse among my dad’s old college poetry textbooks that included some of Emily Dickinson’s poems. And among those poems I discovered the first verse beyond the nursery rhymes of my early childhood that I knew I had to memorize.  It seemed to me so clever and true that I wanted to put it in my pocket and keep it for myself always.  So I did:

“The pedigree of honey
Does not concern the Bee—
A clover anytime to Him
Is aristocracy.”

These lines embody much that I loved then and still love now about Dickinson’s poetry—economy of line, frankness, and a knack for telling the small but significant truth.  In these four lines she captures the perfect symbiosis between blossom and bee—one of the world’s most essential relationships.  This tiny poem has always stayed with me.  When I was learning calligraphy as a teenager, it was one of the sentences I would write again and again, decorating it with flourishes in the curlicued shape of a bee’s flight pattern.  In the years since then, it’s been a mantra, a touchstone that even now I repeat when I’m working in my garden: “The pedigree of honey does not concern the bee,” I murmur as I trellis the sweet peas or weed among the thyme and rosemary, and again at night as I drift off to sleep, knees aching, hair still smelling of mud and leaves . . . “a clover anytime to him is aristocracy . . . .”

But getting back to my childhood summertime obsessions.  The first was reading, and as you might have already guessed, the second was gardening. I loved spending hours in my mother’s flower garden with my face as close to the peonies, the phlox, and the tiger lilies as possible.  In the garden, my senses were heightened, things seemed more real, and I felt more connected to all the thousands of lives around me than I did anywhere else—connected to the worms in the soil, the butterflies careening among the cosmos, the cardinals calling one another from the branches of our white lilac tree.  I wanted to be near enough to spy on the bees working their dizzy magic, near enough so that the flowers would, as Dickinson writes, “make me regret / I am not a bee” (808).  Beyond the garden was noise and flash and distraction, the next-door neighbors arguing, planes roaring overhead, and the distant wash of cars on the highway—people rushing off to a world that seemed preoccupied with less vital things--at least to me.  There in the garden was the much smaller, more vibrant world that Dickinson describes in Poem 1746:

The most important population
Unnoticed dwell,
They have a heaven each instant
Not any hell.

Their names, unless you know them,
’Twere useless tell.
Of bumble-bees and other nations
The grass is full.

The garden to me, as a kid, felt like existence at its most essential.  While I reveled in its beauty, I don’t really think I held a romanticized notion about the pretty flowers, because, I saw life and death quite clearly for what they were when I was in the garden.  In fact, I think if you want a child to understand death, you give her a hoe, a spade, and a pair of shears, and you send her out to vanquish the weeds, turn the compost, and deadhead the roses.  Much as Emily Dickinson did in her own mother’s garden when she was growing up, I saw death all around me in the garden—and in some cases, I was even the cause of it, whether I wanted to be or not.  I quickly learned that this was an unavoidable part of being a gardener.

I also witnessed intimately how everything that dies helps to bring new life into the world.  And that many of the plants that died each year had ingenious ways of coming back to life the following spring.  As Dickinson asks, “If a pod die, shall it not live again?” (Prose fragment 18)  Over time as I continued to garden, continued to watch pods die each season and then live again, and continued to read Dickinson’s poems about the gardens, orchards, and fields surrounding her home in Amherst, I knew that I had found a kindred spirit—and isn’t this one of the key reasons that we read (and write) poetry?  Dickinson herself called the poets she read “the dearest ones of time, the strongest friends of the soul.”

As a girl, I couldn’t put into words what I was discovering about the interconnectedness of life and death in the garden.  In fact, I don’t even think I can now, really.  As Dickinson writes,  “Nature is what we know— /Yet have no art to say" (668).

But she doth protest too much, because she did have the art to say it: When Roses cease to bloom, Sir, /And Violets are done,” she writes,

When Bumblebees in solemn flight
Have passed beyond the Sun —
The hand that paused to gather
Upon this Summer's day Will idle lie — in Auburn —
Then take my flowers — pray!”

Or in “A Bird came down the walk," where she describes the bird that bit an angle worm in halves, “ate the fellow raw,” drank some dew from the grass, and then “hopped sidewise to let a beetle pass.”  She intimately captures in her poems Tennyson’s “nature red in tooth and claw”  (“In Memoriam A.H. H.") with a scientist’s precision and a poet’s sensibility.  At the same time, she also explores the sacred in the everyday.  “I hope you love birds too,” she wrote to her cousin Eugenia Hall. “It is economical. It saves going to heaven.”  And in “Some Keep the Sabbath” (236) that great old chestnut taught in Introduction to Literature courses everywhere, she eschews conventional religion, finding her spirituality in the family orchard:

Some keep the Sabbath going to Church –
I keep it, staying at Home –
With a Bobolink for a Chorister –
And an Orchard, for a Dome –

Some keep the Sabbath in Surplice –
I, just wear my Wings –
And instead of tolling the Bell, for Church,
Our little Sexton – sings.

God preaches, a noted Clergyman –
And the sermon is never long,
So instead of getting to Heaven, at last –
I’m going, all along.

For Dickinson the garden embodied immortality. As a girl, she describes heaven in a letter to a friend as “the garden we have not seen.”  And many years later, just before her death, she asked to have her casket carried—by the workmen who tended the family’s grounds—in a circle around her garden, through the barn, and then up through the field of buttercups to the Western Cemetery in the center of Amherst.  Heaven was inseparable from the flowers, the birds, and the bees, which were all parallels to and metaphors for her own life—for our own lives.  That is not to say that she didn’t see them as ends in themselves, but that by seeing and valuing them for their own sake, she came to understand her own existence all the better.  In the garden she found a way to comprehend mortality—and proof of immortality.

When I was a little girl in the garden with my shears and my spade, Emily Dickinson taught me something that I would later come to feel in my bones as true, and it’s that at root, a gardener thinks about life and death always as one. In each flower's race toward blossoming is its race, too, toward decline. I'm saying nothing new, only that when you garden, this thought is always present. In the spring garden I am surrounded by the new growth of runner bean sprouts, the full flush of a climbing rose, and the last breath of a lush peony all at the same moment. My wheelbarrow is piled high with a day's kill: the weeds I pulled, faded blossoms I plucked, lily beetles I crushed between gloved finger and thumb. The gardener must not be squeamish about death. She must recognize its necessity even as she rejoices at the sight of her first ever iris uncurling itself with a flourish from the spear of its stem.  She must also accept its necessity when that iris blossom dies.

It’s a Saturday in October, and the garden is dying.  But it will live again—improbably, miraculously, this coming spring.  Even as it dies, it is living, and it will always live on, as will the iris, the rose, and the jasmine, the Indian Pipe and the clover, in Emily Dickinson’s words.

And so, because she had the art to say it, as well as anyone ever has, and as reverently, too:

“In the name of the Bee—
And of the Butterfly—
And of the Breeze—
Amen!” (21)

Note: Numbers in parentheses refer to poem numbers in The Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by R. W. Franklin, 1999.

5 on 5

So much has been happening around here this past month!  Lots of interesting things are in the works. I have much news to share and many stories to tell, but first I have the great joy of taking part in 5 on 5, along with some wonderful photographer friends. Each month we share 5 of our own photos from the previous 30 days, and we link to each other's blogs, creating a chain of beautiful photos and stories.  How wonderful is that? Big thanks to my friend, Stephanie, for starting this group back at the beginning of the year.  I've known Stephanie for years now through the blogging/Flickr world, and I've long admired her photography, so I'm just chuffed to be a part of this group.  You can see her 5 on 5 post here.

As some of you know, I've been working on a series of pictures that I'm calling my Dark Flower portraits.  The peonies above are one of the newest in the series.  I'll have news to share about the series in my next post, but for now, I'll just share some writing I did in an Instagram post that was inspired by this photo:

A gardener thinks about life and death always as one. In each flower's race toward blossoming is its race, too, toward decline. I'm saying nothing new, only that when you garden, this thought is always present. In the garden I am surrounded by the new growth of runner bean sprouts, the full flush of a climbing rose, and the last breath of a lush peony all at the same moment. My wheelbarrow is piled high with a day's kill: the weeds I pulled, faded blossoms I plucked, lily beetles I crushed between gloved finger and thumb. The gardener must not be squeamish about death. She must recognize its necessity even as she rejoices at the sight of her first ever iris uncurling itself with a flourish from the spear of its stem.

Not all of my recent photos have been dark.  In fact, some have been quite light and even ethereal. I'm taking nearly all of my stills in a northeast facing window of my little workroom/studio/study.  It provides my favorite light for stills.  I can't imagine taking photos without that northeastern light!

The peonies in the twilight shot above are only a few of the thousands to be seen and smelled at Gilsland Farm in June.  This old farm is home to the Maine Audubon Society, and it is one of my favorite spots anywhere in the world.  Meadows, woods, marshes, and lush gardens all in one magical place on an estuary just a few minutes outside of Portland, but truly a world away.

Clearly, peonies have been inspiring me over the past month, but so have many far less showy flowers right here in my own gardens, including the pelargoniums (geraniums).  In the shot above I tucked some lovely wild pink ones into a busted old crate.

The purple geranium in this final shot is one of Todd's favorite flowers.  It's combined with a wee sprig of lady's mantle in a handblown perfume bottle that a former boss gave me a lifetime ago. The Dark Flower portrait series is helping me to see photography--and thus my life--in a new way, and helping me come to terms with some things about the creative process (and the process of just living in this messy, heartbreaking, beautiful world) that have always frightened me.  I relish this chance to dive deeper and work harder.

Thanks, wonderful friends, for stopping by.  You never cease to inspire me.

Moody Me

Hello, my friends!  I can't begin to tell you how much I have missed being here on the blog this past month.  There I had made a big promise to post about our Brimfield adventures, and then I just fell off the map.  Two things happened: first, my little Brimfield post kept growing and growing into a big, all-encompassing flea market post.  Not unlike Brimfield itself, it started spilling out over the sides and becoming a little more than I could handle in just one brief post, so I've decided to develop it more and take my time with it.  Second, my life speeded up much faster than I had planned.  I have too much on my plate with work right now, and I haven't been able to keep up with, well, much else.  

But all that is boring.  All that matters is that I'm here now.  I managed to steal some time this week to do a still life shoot or two--woohoo!  The shot above is a vase I inherited from my Memere.  It's filled with purple and chartreuse posies from our gardens.  The backdrop is an old, beat up blackboard.  The fabric is a pretty scarf I bought in London at Spitalfields.  The lighting is my steady favorite--the moody north light I get coming through the window in my study/studio.  Have I told you before that this window is beside the bathroom door, so I end up doing a lot of shoots against that door, which often means blocking access to the bathroom for hours.  Good thing we have a second bathroom downstairs!

I was thrilled to discover this morning that the photo had been included by my amazing friends Kim and Aeleen in their #fouriadorefriday feature on Instagram.  You can take a peek at the beautiful grid they selected here.

This week here in coastal Maine we are finally having springish/summerish weather!!!  The sun is shining and the gardens are bursting with life.  I'm working in them whenever I have a moment to spare.  You'd think all my photos at the moment would be flooded with light and white and beachy sunshine, but I'm kind of loving dwelling in the darker, moodier realm right now.  The shot below is a "portrait" of Mr. Magpie.  Those who know him know why this is a portrait.  ;)

Sending a warm hug, lovelies!  More very soon.  xoxo Gigi

Vintage Spring

Hello, chickadees!  Just stopping in to share some spring blossoms.  The crabapple is blooming in the front yard, and the lilacs and azaleas have just joined in, too.  Next up will be the viburnums and rhodies, and then the weigelas, mock oranges, and bridal veil spirea will follow not long after that.  

Life is a rush of activity this spring, but we did take one day to hit Brimfield Flea Market with our friend Kazeem, from Portland Trading Co.  I'll have some photos and finds to share soon!

My photo above was featured by DistressedFX on their Instagram feed and Facebook page this week.  If you haven't tried this app, I recommend it for photos that you want to really manipulate and push in exciting directions.  I use this app as well as Stackables to create moody effects for some of my iPhone photos.  I think I ended up using both apps on the top photo of the crabapple blossoms.  Before I used the textures, though, I upped the exposure and desaturated the photo a bit.  The background of that photo is my picnic table, which most people would think really needs a paint job, but I use it a lot for photos, so it will stay shabby chic a while longer.  ;)  

For photos I take with my big girl camera, I often use fewer textures and stick to subtler processing techniques in Lightroom.  I do some of that processing from scratch or with my own presets, but I also use presets by other folks, including this exciting new set from Kim Klassen.  Presets provide me with so much flexibility, and they give me ideas for creating several moods with one shot.  If you've never tried them before, take a peek at Kim's collection.  I think you will love it.

Vintage finds from Brimfield in the next post!  I have some exciting things to show you.  

Happy weekend, my friends! 

April Rains--A Garden Update

The April rains have come, and with them the green and red buds on the trees.  Out in the garden we've had crocuses--then snow--then then more rain and even more crocuses, sprinkled with some snowdrops.  We have raked and tidied the beds, made way for the grape hyacinths, the buds of which are tinged with purple at their edges.  The tulips are midway up, as are the daffodils and fritillaria.  The lady's mantle are everywhere, pushing up their tiny pleated fans through the soil, and the pulmonaria are showing off their polka-dotted leaves.  I've even caught sight of the first secret frills of red where the bleeding hearts grow at the edge of the woodland border.  Out along the edges, the shrub border is filling with color--the red twig dogwoods and the Hakuroo-Nishiki willow are scarlet red, covered with buds.  I'm thrilled to see that all the hard cutting and pruning I've done on the lilacs these last two years is paying off.  They are looking stronger than ever--and they are loaded with buds.  

Chores for the coming couple of weeks include dividing some of the day lilies and spreading the three yards of compost that we're having delivered this weekend.  No bed will be left out.  Everyone will get a top dressing to start the growing season with a bang.  I'll also be starting many, many flower seedlings for the new cutting garden I'm planning to grow in one of the raised beds this year.  And then there are the dahlias.  They will be emerging from their winter sleep down in the cellar.  I'll chit them out until the soil is warm enough to put them in.  For the past couple of seasons I've mixed them in with other plantings, letting them grow with all the other flowers.  This year I think they may get their own bed.  We shall see.

Spring came late here in the Maine this year, but now that it's here, every plant seems to be rushing to put on a show.  I am relishing these cool days, especially the ones when the sun puts in an appearance.  It's too cool yet for the mosquitos, so we can just be out there in the mud, spreading grass seeds, trimming limbs, and dreaming up new garden plans.  I hope your spring is shaping into a beautiful one. If you garden, I'd love to hear what is blooming right now and what you're up to in your garden.  More soon--plus pictures of the early spring garden!

Hope and the Garden

Happy March, my friends!  For all my moaning about this winter (it turns out this has been the coldest February on record in Portland, Maine, and among the snowiest winters), I do love the light in March.  It gives me hope, and hope makes me dream about my garden.

I have ordered my flower seeds from Johnny's, as I plan to grow a cutting garden in one of the raised beds this year.  It will have as many zinnias as I can fit in shades of salmon pink, raspberry, and charteuse, as well as cosmos, nigellas, and so many other beauties. 

Right now, those beds are so deeply buried that they don't even make mounds in the snow, but I know they are there, waiting.  And the roses and lavender and black-eyed Susans in the perennial beds are, too.  

And then there are the hydrangeas.  I have lots and lots of them all around the gardens, and I cut loads of blooms to dry for the winter.  They keep me going until the first crocuses and snowdrops appear where I planted them in the grass.  Most years those early bulbs begin to bloom in mid to late March here in coastal Maine, but I think it will be April this year.  Spring will be short, but with all this snow, the ground will be wet, too, which means it will likely be lush.

I've got lots of veggies in mind.  I always grow tomatoes, lettuces, runner beans, radishes, peas, and lots of herbs.  This year I think I'm going to grow potatoes, too.  Let me know what else you think I should try.  What have you had good luck growing?

I'm thinking of you all and wondering how you're faring.  For those of you in the Northern Hemisphere who are at the tail end of winter, have you started planning your gardening season yet?  I'd love to hear what you'll be planting.  I'm also curious about when the growing season actually begins for you.  I think here in Maine we're kind of towards the extreme end of things in that our winters are long and very cold and our growing season is very short.  I'm always amazed by how much we actually get to grow in about half a year's time!  And, yes, for those who have asked me in past posts or on Instagram, yes, I would LOVE to have a greenhouse.  Maybe some year soon I'll have one.  Anything to give me more time with the plants. 

In the meantime, I'm loving the sunlight and the little spark of hope it lights in me for another season of green.

xo Gigi

P.S. Last week The Magpie's Fancy passed its 6-year mark.  I can hardly believe I've been blogging here for all these years.  Thank you for making it such a joy.

Home for the Holidays . . . and All Year Long

Hellebores on my father's antique desk in the dining room.  

I've been wanting to write an update about our house all fall, and I'm finally getting to it now, at the very time that Compass is running a series called Starter Stories, featuring bloggers posting about their first apartments, their starter homes, or the homes that gave them a fresh start.  Urban Compass is a very user-friendly real estate platform that connects folks looking for apartments in NYC with neighborhoods that suit their personality and preferences.   

The side table at night in the dining room this past fall.  

I'll share a photo later this week of it with the manger for Christmas.  

I'm excited to participate in the series, since we've lived in seven apartments, one loft condo, and three houses over the twenty-four years that we've been together, and I know a thing or two about the challenges and rewards of finding just the right place to call home--whether it's your first place or your eleventh!  And while this wee cottage is far from our starter home, it has definitely been our start-over home.  

Old books find their way into every room in the house.

As I've written about before, I believe that a place can save you, if you let it.  Mr. Magpie and I moved back here to Portland, Maine, after two decades of school and jobs had carried us off to distant places.  Returning to the city where we first met was probably the most important decision we've ever made for ourselves as individuals and as a couple.  We'd gone through a heartbreaking time in our lives, and we desperately needed to move and start fresh.  But we couldn't just sell our loft condo in Massachusetts, buy a house here in Maine, and be done with it.  The recession had dropped to its lowest point, and our condo's mortgage was under water.  Selling wasn't an option. So, like many other folks at the time, we rented the condo out to tenants, and then became tenants again ourselves.  After several years of being homeowners, it was a bit of an adjustment, but a necessary one if we wanted to live in Maine.

An autumn vignette in the living room

We rented here in Portland for a couple of years, saving our pennies and biding our time until we were finally able to buy our home in the summer of 2012.  It was actually a more exciting day to me than the day we bought our first home.  As some longtime readers know, during the first month after we moved in, we set to work right away, making this place our own.  One of the first things we did was to paint the rooms in shades inspired by the Maine coast.  In the two years since then we have expanded the gardens outside each summer, turning them into tumbling, colorful cottage gardens.

The Hobbit Garden in midsummer, with phlox, bee balm, Abraham Darby roses, lavender, salvia, and petunias blooming.

Scarlet runner beans and nasturtiums at the back door.  In the foreground is a Bridal veil spirea.

Looking from the spot where the Hobbit Garden (named for its curving wattle fence) transitions into the little woodland garden.  On the other side of the fence are our herb gardens and the patio.  The wild looking arbor is made from branches and this past summer it was covered in scarlet runner beans and sweet peas.

One corner of the herb garden ( taken in Fall 2013, while we were building the arbor)

As much as I love the gardens, I find myself also loving winter hibernation in this house.  The Christmas season never fails to stir the most domestic of feelings in my magpie heart.  As soon as the first snowflakes fall, I'm lighting a fire in the fireplace, baking shortbread, and stringing fairy lights in nearly every room.  I can't help myself.  

Christmas 2012

Our bedroom/sleeping loft

A few days ago we made our now annual trek to a local tree farm to cut down the Christmas tree. It was a blustery, frigid afternoon, and the muddy pathways between the trees were coated with a sheer slick of ice, so it was tricky to even get to the trees, let alone saw one down, but we managed, bringing home a smaller one than usual to fit into one corner of the living room.  

Late afternoon at Staples Tree Farm

I've also draped the mantle with fresh greens from the trees in our yard, tucking in pinecones that I've iced with silver glitter as well as the bird nests I've found on the ground over the last couple of autumns.  Our yard is home to many birds, squirrels, chipmunks, and other wild beasties, and we feed them seeds and water year round.  For Mr. Magpie and me, our home wouldn't be complete without the wild creatures outside as well as the wild ones inside (Scout and Dill, our tuxedo cats). 

A closeup of one of the nests on this year's holiday mantle.  I'll have more photos of the whole mantle and other decorations soon!

The kitchen windowsill at suppertime with a string of fabulous Starry Starry Lights

The tree is now up and decorated, but I've still got work to do.  There's the manger to finish, and the sparkling winter village.  The ever-thoughtful Mr. Magpie bought extra strings of fairy lights, so you know I'll be plugging them into every available outlet.  I think it's time to play some Christmas CDs and mull some apple cider.  The holidays equal home for me, and this year more than ever, I'll be grateful to start a new year in our little white cape beneath the great white pine.  

Fall Botanicals: Tips for Arranging Floral Patterns

Earlier this fall during my annual cleanup of the gardens, I began putting some of the colorful leaves, blossoms, and berries into a basket.  Their shapes and textures were so beautiful that I decided I needed to do something more memorable than just plunking them into a mason jar to keep on the windowsill for a few days.

Using a worn old tablecloth as my makeshift backdrop, I arranged torn petals from marigolds, nasturtiums, and hydrangeas into simple medallion shapes on my picnic table.  I combined them with tiny pinecones and whatever else I could find in the yard, and then I grabbed my iPhone and snapped a few shots of the various arrangements.

I had to work quickly, as it was a chilly afternoon, and my fingers were growing numb, but I found that the more fanciful I got with the arrangements, the more I was loving them.  Later that evening, safely inside with a cup of Earl Grey, I processed the photos on my laptop and then shared a few of them in a post here on the blog, as well as on Instagram and Facebook.

I was quite surprised and touched by people's reactions.  Some folks even emailed to say that they thought I should turn the images into greeting cards.  I've been making and photographing more of the arrangements since then, and I had some prints done on Shutterfly.  I'm on the hunt now for some vintage gilded frames so I can hang the prints in our guest bedroom.

Today, as I worked on the latest in my "Autumn Gatherings" series, I took photos of the steps as I went along so I could share the process with you.  This isn't really a tutorial, since anyone can arrange flowers in beautiful patterns, but I have discovered a few tips along the way that really work for me, and I hope they may be helpful for someone else trying this.

First, the background is key.  If you want your arrangement to have a sort of vintage, nostalgic look, it's  helpful to begin with a vintage background.  Today I used this wrinkled, worn, and faded piece of Irish linen that I've had for years.  The colors of the flowers printed on it are just right as a backdrop to autumn leaves and branches.  (In fact, I used this same fabric as the background for my Artful Blogging post.)

Next, I gathered from our yard whatever flowers, berries, twigs, leaves, cones, and seed pods struck my fancy.  If your backyard happens to be more of a wooded forest, be careful, as some plants can be poisonous. 

Here in Maine, we're deep into autumn, but I still have a few hardy flowers blooming in my garden beds and in the pots on my front porch, so these were musts for me, plus some scarlet runner beans left on my arbor, and the last of the husk cherries in their lovely paper-lantern shells.  Various shrubs and woody perennials provided lots of great material, too.  The most important thing is to find an interesting range of textures, shapes, and sizes.  The colors this time of year tend to be fairly easy to harmonize.

Now that it's getting really chilly out, it's easier to work inside, so once I'd gathered my materials and placed any tender stems in water to stay fresh while I was working, I stationed myself on a large table on my sun porch, which was ideal, as it gets flooded with a particularly lovely warm, golden late afternoon sunlight this time of year.  

I began by playing with colors and shapes.  I tend to lean toward ovals and circles for my designs, but other shapes would, of course, be beautiful, too.  What I love about making medallion shapes is that you can have a beautiful, useable shot at almost any point in the assembly process.  If you want something as simple as the above mini pumpkin surrounded by geranium leaves, this would be nice as is.  You could move right on to cropping and processing the photo from here.  

I found myself smitten with this sweet little robin's nest that had fallen from one of the mock oranges bordering our yard.  I would never steal a nest from birds, but I do collect the windfall nests that I find on our property every autumn--or you could fashion a little nest yourself from twigs and moss.  This one just seemed like a perfect centerpiece for my medallion.

I love varying textures, shapes and colors, and then repeating certain ones for effect.  Once I had placed the yellow flower (the last one of the year from my porch planter) in the center of the nest, I knew that I would want to pick up on that yellow and accentuate it.  So, I simply played with possibilities.

Lamb's ears are particularly wonderful because of their silver-green color, their spear shape, and their fuzzy texture.  I love them contrasted with the azalea leaves that I've laid on top of them; the azalea's leathery texture and its burgundy color contrast beautifully with the lamb's ears, but both plants are the same basic shape, so there's some repetition, too, which is always pleasing to the eye.  The dark purple leaves radiating out from beneath the geranium leaves are from one of my many forsythias.  They repeat the same shape, but offer yet another color.  Plus, as yellow's complementary color, purple is a great back layer.  

As with any creative process, a huge part of it is trial and error for me.  I tried adding bits of pink begonia blossoms along with the purple and pink scarlet runner beans, but then the whole thing started feeling just a wee bit Easter-y, so I scrapped that idea and continued on.  This time I used much more autumnal petals of orange marigolds and red nasturtiums.

In the photo above I felt I was nearly finished, but I wanted one more layer to give it a sense of blooming out almost beyond the borders of the frame.  

My final step was to add some lavender leaves to the outer tips of the forsythias.  They pick up on the silver of the lamb's ears, and they also repeat the shapes of the central flower blossom petals.  I love that not all the leaves in the image are exactly the same size, and I never fuss over making things exactly symmetrical.  Perfectly imperfect suits my eye and temperament much more.

Finally, when it comes to processing the photos, I tend to play with lightening the exposure just a little bit.  I also sometimes blur the edges of the image, as I've done in the photo above.  Many of you are incredible photographers and much more brilliant than I at photo processing.  If you're newer to it, you don't even need to be a Photoshop expert.  Try using a simple online photo processor.  Most of them have loads of ways to give your photos a vintage look.  Or, simply snap away on your phone and use a processing app to get wonderful results.  If you want to see live examples of how others process their photos, YouTube is always a great teaching tool.  The version below is finished off with a final texture layered over the top of the image.  The texture is a photograph of another piece of old linen, which, once processed, gives an even more vintage look to the image.

Before I have Shutterfly print up my next round of photos (and my first batch of "Autumn Gatherings" greeting cards), I'll likely play with each image a little more, tweaking it until I'm satisfied with the results.  For me, the most important aspect of making this series is how much fun it is to create beautiful patterns from the bits and pieces I've gathered from my own backyard.  Now I can hardly wait to make the "Winter Gatherings" series.  I'm already imagining the dreamy Christmas cards.  Holly, pine, and arborvitae, here I come!