At Blooms Galore My feet Got Sore

To me, the term "working in the garden" means sawing down trees, digging deep holes, pruning branches, pulling stumps; to Ginny it means walking for hours and hours and hours around a flower show.

Saturday, the 1,400 members of the Garden Club of Jacksonville hosted a festival called “Blooms Galore & More”. The event featured 55 booths donated by member circles and 35 vendors.

“It’s an effort to fulfill the garden club’s goals to reach out and educate the community on environmental issues and the beautification of Jacksonville, said the announcement which Ginny found.

She lugged me to this educational thing where speakers at various displays educated me about plants.

I learned:

• Some plants have flowers.
• All plants eat dirt.
• They need water every once in a while.
• At Blooms Galore my feet get sore.

To learn these valuable gardening facts took only two and a half hours.

An Ancient Memory — Back in 1970 while I was an over-the-road truck driver, we were passing through Oakland, California, and somehow Ginny discovered that an Iris Society was having a show.

I escorted her to it.

Once there, I found hundreds of female women looking at a room full of green things and lying to each other that they could tell the difference between one plant and another.

I thought I was the only male in the place, till across the room I spotted what had to be one of Oakland’s original Hell’s Angels bikers. Studded leather jacket, chains, jeans, beard — this was in 1970 remember, and such an outfit was not to be seen in just any mall.

I approached the guy and said, “Looks like we are the only two men in this place”.

“Yeah,” he grunted. “I had to be here. Drove my mother.”

“I’m here because of my wife,” I said. “I’m not really into this sort of thing”.

“Me neither,” he said. “I’m a camellia man myself”.

For some reason I’ve never forgotten his words.