Janet Alcorn

My mother always cooked with lemons. We had a lemon tree in our backyard when I was growing up in Northern California, and it produced lemons by the bushel basket. She even left a huge bag of lemons on the front seat of my car when I was in college, so my dorm-mates and I could make fresh lemonade. That activity was a wholesome departure from our usual shenanigans. The house we bought here in Tucson came with a sad, neglected lemon tree. We’ve been pampering it since we moved in–giving it lots of water, mulching it with compost, and, in my case, whispering sweet nothings to it as though…

For Cee’s Flower of the Day photo challenge, another throwback to my Portland gardening days. Taken April 7, 2007. I posted another trillium picture back in January, when I was looking over memories of times and gardens past. We don’t have trilliums here in Tucson–trilliums don’t have spines or thorns, and I believe it’s a local ordinance that anything grown here must be able to stab you. I don’t miss the rainy Portland winters, but I do–occasionally–miss slogging through my garden between showers to see if the trilliums were blooming yet. After months of grey and rain, I’d cling to any sign of spring the way an aphid clings to…

For Cee’s Flower of the Day photo challenge. When I lived in Portland, I loved anything that bloomed in winter or early spring, anything that added a little color to those dark, rainy days. In the late 90s, we salvaged a bunch of native trilliums from a construction site (with permission), and they bloomed faithfully every year.