“The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing—to reach the Mountain, to find the place where all the beauty came from—my country, the place where I ought to have been born. Do you think it all meant nothing, all the longing? The longing for home? For indeed it now feels not like going, but like going back.”
—C. S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces
This morning, my daughter and I met a friend of ours for breakfast.
“Are you coming to pick bluebells?” she asked as we finished our pancakes and potato hash.
“I would love to! I was wondering earlier in the week what I would do for an arrangement this week, and then I remembered your bluebells! And I found a wild patch of lily-of-the-valley,” I replied.
Our fingers froze whilst traipsing through a muddy wood picking handfuls of English bluebells and lily-of-the-valley. Back home, I added a few stems of lamb’s ears and forget-me-nots to create a magical woodland arrangement for church tomorrow. How many times over the past couple of years I’ve headed out the door on Sunday morning—clippers in hand—wondering what the God of All Creation has provided for me to adorn His table!
My yard and garden is actually not to my own taste. There are cages of chicken wire trying to protect my beloved hydrangeas and roses from the deer, a broad variety of flowering trees and perennial shrubs, bulbs and annuals.
Masses of grasses and a full spectrum of yarrow claim square footage in my front meadow gardens. I threw spoonfuls of California poppy seeds into every vacant hollow of these beds last week.
My preference would be organization. A carefully curated handful of species and varieties on repeat throughout, giving pleasing rhythms and orderly neatness to a cohesive, designed whole. So, why this riot of craziness? I don’t find it unappealing—there is some beautiful surprise in nearly every corner. It’s just not my favorite.
The answer goes back about four years. I was well on my way to a perfectly appointed design. My front garden was arranged with a pattern of hydrangeas, shrub roses, and flowering trees. A neat row of arbor vitae were carefully interspersed with bayberries in a harboring hedge to shelter our local rabbit population. But then, I felt called to beautify the place where our particular corner of followers of Christ gather to worship. I was determined to see if I could bring some sort of fresh, “real” arrangement for Sunday services every single week—rain, shine, or snow. It wasn’t the first time I’ve been stirred to do such a thing, but it led me to an entirely new way of gardening.
My journey into floral design started when I was about two. I remember picking some of Paw’s treasured azaleas—his tribute to Augusta National Golf Club—and cutting pussy willows with him to put into his antique brass fire extinguisher.
From there, I entered a dandelion and honeysuckle phase for a few years. When I was five years old, my family moved to the edge of the world, and I discovered daffodils left by some long-forgotten Georgia farm wife. I dug them up and moved them all over the place. They continue to bear tribute to a mischievous little girl who just wanted to spread golden beauty to every corner of her parent’s farm.
I was among the very early subscribers to both Martha Stewart Magazine and Victoria Magazine, and those two periodicals lit my already overly active imagination on fire. I recognized beauty in the orderliness of a well-thought-out vegetable garden. English manors and country houses—and especially their gardens—filled my dreams. I particularly loved tidy, box-hedged brick paths with pleached or espaliered fruit trees—disciplined gardens under the control of an attentive caretaker.
After college, I worked full-time for a floral wholesaler as a photographer and set designer. I learned floral design from some amazing people and had a very generous budget to attempt to make hospital giftwares look like high-end home decor. It was a challenging job, where every day was different, and the hours were long. But there were always flowers.
Somewhere between my years helping Granny look for the perfect camellia for her Sunday dinner table and dropping hundred-dollar arachnid orchids into a modern glass vase for the summer catalog, I fell madly in love with arranging flowers.
Fast-forward to a few years ago, when I aimed to bring a fresh arrangement every week to church. It was a challenge, especially in winter months, and sometimes there was little but barren twigs. One particular week, when the daffodils were mostly done and the lilacs and peonies were not yet blooming, I went outdoors and gathered a meagre handful of blooms, but somehow the arrangement of a few crabapple branches, some flowering ajuga, and a couple of the very latest daffodils was so much more than the sum of its parts! Once late in the summer, the arrangement was formed entirely from nasturtiums and cherry tomato vines and fruits. Week after week, I am reminded that He is a God of Abundance. He gives in unexpected, unlooked-for, undulating waves of His own goodness.
And this is where the change has been wrought. I’m currently deep in the planning and planting of this year’s arrangements. They all start as seeds and dreams. I try to think through what will bloom when and for how long. If I plant too many sweet peas and not enough cosmos, what will I have to bring in late September? What color zinnias would work well with the nasturtiums that will inevitably be taking over my garden by late July? It is, therefore, so much easier when I know I have something lovely blooming every week to work with. I’m learning to surrender my own desires for a perfectly precise pattern in my gardening for the sake of offering an arrangement of blossoms on the altar table at church each week.
No matter how carefully I plan, I am constantly reminded that “Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights” (James 1.17 ESV). More weeks than not, I have only one rose or three foxgloves. But they are enough because they are gifts to me from an infinitely beautiful Creator, and because they are offered back to Him.
An arrangement of flowers is most surely a tiny thing to offer to the King of the Universe, but it’s what I have; it’s what He’s given me. And week by week, they remind me of the Beauty that was and is and is to come. It feels like a liturgy of petals and branches from Him, through Him, and to Him.
The in-essay images are courtesy of Jordan Durbin and are used with her kind permission for Cultivating.
The featured image, “Manor Road Hydrangeas,” is courtesy of Lancia E. Smith and is used with her glad permission for Cultivating.
Jordan Elise Durbin is a cultivator of five wondrous children, a slightly out of control garden, and a small-but-efficient pottery studio. Her laundry piles can attest to her many activities and willingness to do anything but manage said piles. She can frequently be found running Ohio’s magical trails with her children, baking large quantities of buttery goodness, and writing about the woes and wonders of medieval chickenry. She is the author of The Chicken Pox: A Feathery Retelling of Hansel and Gretel, Periwinkle, and The Prodigal Fox. She has contributed to Cultivating since 2018. Jordan is the curator for the column “Cultivating A Maker’s Life”. She looks for the glory of God in every corner of creation and regularly finds it.
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