Grandma's Garden

Two summers ago, my grandma moved in with my parents. She was 87, had been a widow for 18 years, and was finally willing to sell her car and her house and give up some of her independence. She'd lived with my family briefly before - for a few months several years ago while she was receiving treatments for skin cancer - and this time, my parents had a full, permanent reno done to their house. They converted the living room into a main-floor bedroom for her, and got rid of the dining room to enlarge the kitchen.

One of the things I was saddest to see go when she sold her ranch house in the Village of Blissfield (a small town in southern Michigan, about 20 minutes from Toledo, Ohio) was her garden. Over the years she'd cultivated a variety of flowering plants including tulips, roses, lilies, hyacinth, succulents, daffodils, clematis vines (and more I'm sure I'm forgetting), all in different colors. In her front yard, she also had a magnolia tree. I loved seeing those flowers whenever we visited her (which was often - for many years growing up, my family drove two-hours round trip nearly every weekend to see her), and over the years accumulated a lot of great "source photography" from her gardens to use in my flower-themed artwork.

Here are some of my favorites of those photographs, below: