in recent days, my best friend Elise and I enjoyed some found time and took the opportunity to drive 90 minutes north of Grantham to the idyllic village of Sugar Hill. The main purpose of our little road trip was to check out what we had heard is one of the most scenic venues in the state of New Hampshire. This is particularly true during early to mid-June when the colorful lupines are at their annual flowering peak.    

By way of background, Sugar Hill is one of those small northern New Hampshire towns that probably looks and feels a lot today just as it did, say, 75 years ago. In fact, it is officially the newest incorporated town in NH having earned this status 60 years ago in 1962. Once a Victorian resort town, Sugar Hill is perhaps best known today as the home of Polly’s Pancake Parlor which has been serving up breakfast/brunch fare for over 80 years.

In early June, it’s the lupines that take center stage in Sugar Hill. For nearly 30 years the town has hosted the annual Sugar Hill Lupine Festival and Market however, like so many other events, it has been regrettably cancelled in recent years due to the ongoing pandemic. https://www.lupinefestival.com
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Nonetheless, the festival cancellation didn’t stop the annual return of the blue, purple, and pink lupines!

​Upon arriving in the village, it was not hard at all to spot the lupines which seemed to be popping up just about everywhere…along the road, between houses, etc.  However, the most stunning displays were in many of Sugar Hill’s open fields with the White Mountains themselves serving as a spectacular backdrop.  Here’s a photograph of a field of lupines we came across swaying back and forth as if they had been choreographed with a wide range of mountains including Mount Lafayette and Cannon Mountain, separated by Franconia Notch, in the near distance (Mount Washington was also in view but, as is often the case, was experiencing clouds covering the summit).  Painters with their palettes were a common sight as they captured the stunning lupine/mountain images on canvas.  

​In addition to multiple open fields of lupines, we noticed the flowers thriving in other parts of the village as well including behind the famous Harman’s Cheese and Country Store and on the grounds of St. Matthew’s Chapel, a quintessential New England white-steepled church on a hill.  While there was essentially no traffic or crowds for us to compete with in viewing the lupines, we did take note of visitors from both near and far – including international tourists - that chose to take in these special sights as evidenced by car license plates from Texas, Mississippi, Virginia and all six New England states.  We also learned that some visitors actually time their visits to the lupine fields to coincide with sunrise or sunset where the sunlight can dramatically alter the appearance, and beauty, of the lupines depending upon the time of day. You might want to consider a brief trip to enjoy the natural beauty for yourselves. 

​The GGC’s blog returns today but with a twist. The name is now  simply Friday Flowers and Folklore with stories posted on a less regular schedule. I invite garden club members to write stories too and send them to me with pictures. Together we can keep the GGC blog going all year round. 

Today's  blog is about bollen, bollen, and meer bollen (Dutch for bulbs, bulbs, and more bulbs).  I joined the million and a half tourists who descended on the Keukenhof Gardens in Lisse in the northwest part of the Netherlands. The garden is open for only eight weeks each year which makes for quite a viewing frenzy.  If the tulips blossomed continuously every day of the year there, I believe that the total number of visitors to Keukenhof would be far fewer. There’s something about a deadline that gets people moving.
 
Unlike the usual visitors who take selfies and make sure they and their friends are in every picture with the tulips, to me it was all about the flowers. The design and theme of the garden are different each year to lure folks back again and again. Even visiting in one of the first weeks will be different from visiting near the end of the fleeting season.
 
More than 100 growers donate seven million bulbs including crocus, daffodils, and hyacinth plus 800 varieties of tulips. When I visited in late April, the crocus and daffodils were gone so the tulips were the stars of the show, sometimes edged with purple hyacinth to help the colors pop. 
 
I watched in horror as some gardeners were systematically picking all the still good looking, yellow tulip flowers in one area. Since tulips only bloom for around a week, the tulip bulbs are hand planted in the fall in layers like a parfait with the later bloomers are the bottom and earlier bloomers closer to the surface. That strategy isn’t enough to ensure continuous blooms, so when an area of flowers is about to fade, they remove them. Surprisingly, the swath of greenery contrasts beautifully with their colorful neighbors. It’s all part of the plan.
 
What do they do with those thousands of bulbs when the eight weeks are up? They simply throw them away. Those 100 growers benefit from their donations with the ability to advertise that theirs are Keukenhof bulbs.
 
The tulip industry is gigantic in the Netherlends. They are grown to sell as bulbs or as cut flowers. The cut flowers are picked before they blossom. The bulb flowers are “topped” after the flowers bloom. In Dutch it’s called “Tulpen Koppen” and is necessary to ensure that the bulbs get as much nourishment as possible. Below is a link to see what it looks like. Prepare yourself for a shock.
 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_5cef0JYSMU
 
Garden Club member Anke Clews is from the little town of Hengelo in the Netherlands near the German border. Anke and her family attended many tulip festival parades and events where they often bought strings of tulips and decorate the hood of their car with them.  These flowers came from the topped fields and thus had their moment to shine. When I visited Anke at her home in Grantham recently, I commented on the four gorgeous, red tulips in her front yard. Anke told me she doesn’t know where they came from. She didn’t plant them. Hmmm, I have lots of theories—all of them delightful. There is nothing like a little mystery—especially when it involves tulips. 

Anke's mystery tulip

The time has come for me to put the Friday Flowers and Folklore blog on a hiatus until next spring when the flowers and the stories will start popping again.
 
Thank you to all the folks who invited me into their gardens or told me their stories. I couldn’t have done it without you.
 
Please enjoy these photos that I took this year. 

There’s more to the story about Susan and Jeff Figley’s King Blossom Farm but it has taken two blogs to tell it. There are still plenty of apples ripe for the picking which will continue for a few more weeks. Susan told me that the cold weather makes the Macintosh apples sweeter so she uses them to make much of her apple products.
 
Along with heirloom apple trees, they grow heirloom fruit including tomatoes with names like Aunt Ruby’s Green, Red Zebra, German Green, and Yellow Rainbow. Heirloom fruit may not be as uniformly pretty as their genetically modified relatives, but they are healthier and tastier.

Space is at a premium on their six acre farm so many of the vegetables are grown hanging from string in their greenhouse rather than on the ground which makes cool tomato and cucumber jungles. Another specialty is fresh and dried herbs.
 
Jeff does most of the growing, while Susan cans, preserves, and dries their produce making a huge variety of goodies including pickles, butters, simple syrups (like Sour Cherry and Pumpkin Spice), and a whole array of products that she sells in their little shop “The Heirloom Gourmet” on the property. She also sells her products online at Etsy filling orders from all over the country and beyond.
 
Susan actively seeks old recipes which she collects and creates. She told me it took her two years to talk someone into giving Susan her great grandmother’s zucchini relish recipe. She invited me into her remarkable kitchen where she had just made a batch of pear ginger applesauce which I got to sample. The only thing better than the aroma, was the flavor.
 
In the spirit of small farmers working together to produce quality New Hampshire provisions, King Blossom Farm has partnered with their neighbors including Greg Morneau of Daisy Hill Farm whom Susan refers to as her ‘gardener-in-crime.’ Greg taps his maple trees and Susan helps him boil the syrup, bottle it, add labels that Susan designed, and sell the finished products. Greg and Susan both keep hives on their properties and share the work of tending for the honey bees and collecting the honey which Susan sells in various shapes and sizes. Greg is also the pumpkin man who sells his overflow of pumpkins at Susan’s.

Bardo Farm in Croydon supplies meat that is sold at Susan’s shop and takes orders for fresh turkeys for Thanksgiving. The eggs they sell come from a number of neighbors who raise chickens and can’t possibly eat all their eggs. I have no doubt that farmers sharing their expertise and produce was the way of life for centuries with the “we’re all in this together” spirit that helped them survive.
 
Visiting King Blossom Farm is like a trip back in time. Jeff and Susan love to show people around and teach visitors about their natural form of agriculture.  I brought my grandson there this summer to pick raspberries, and we stayed for an hour as Jeff walked us around his land and green house. My grandson asked a zillion questions that Jeff patiently answered.
 
A big thank you to Susan and Jeff for showing me their farm and letting me interview them.  Here are the links  to their websites:
https://kingblossomfarm.com/
http://www.theheirloomgourmet.com/
https://www.facebook.com/kingblossomfarm  
https://www.facebook.com/theheirloomgourmet
https://www.instagram.com/theheirloomgourmet/
https://www.etsy.com/shop/TheHeirloomGourmet

In the spring, GGC member Marcia Hanke asked me to check out the beautiful white flowers that were growing in abundance on shrubs in her yard on her newly purchased property. My trusty app PictureThis identified them as hobblebush. The white flowers are hydrangea-like but what really intrigued me were the textured, heart-shaped leaves like valentines from Mother Nature.

I learned that when the tip of a branch touches the ground (which is often) they root themselves and grow more bushes making for a thick jumble of twigs and leaves. People bushwhacking through the forest were easily tripped up or hobbled in these under-story plants thus giving the Virburnum lantanoides its nickname.
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During the growing season, I noted their progress and tried to capture their growing stages from white flowers to green, then red, then black, then no berries and their leaves from deep green to red with green veins. Most I came across while hiking but stopped again at Marcia’s house to see how her hobblebush stands were doing and got some more cool pictures in their fall colors.
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Just like all the plants and flowers I have blogged about, whenever I come across one of them again, it’s like meeting up with an old friend.

Here's the link to Lisha's facebook page so that you too can become her friend.
www.facebook.com/lisha.kimball.1

We folks who live in Grantham have a remarkable gem in our very midst. Right now is the perfect time to visit King Blossom Farm because their spectacular apples are ripe for the picking. Among the many varieties are 135+ year old heirloom Macintoshes and Red Delicious. The heirloom apples may not be as uniform or as pretty as the genetically modified relatives but they are a whole lot tastier and healthier. I bought some Macs and Rambos, which is a French dessert apple that’s great for eating. Amazing!
 
Jeff and Susan Figley purchased the farm in 1983 and chose the name King Blossom because every fruiting spur on an apple tree produces a cluster of six buds—five centered around the largest and first to bloom and called the king blossom. The orchard hadn’t been worked in years so they were given expert advice from the UNH Extension Agency and Cornell. There’s a great video on their website of Bill Lord of UNH Extension Agency showing them how to graft apple trees. Did you know that an apple tree grown from a seed won’t produce apples like the tree it came from? Grafting is the only way to insure getting the same type of fruit.
 
After the tree closest to his driveway was hit by truck, Jeff decided to use that tree for an experiment to graft a number of different kinds of apple scions to grow different apples on the same tree. As I walked around the tree, I saw Red Delicious, Hudson, and Black Oxford on different branches of the same tree!
 
Jeff told me that back in the days of the small farms, farmers would grow about six to eight apples trees of different varieties to ripen at different times. A lot of the farms have been abandoned, especially after the devastating 1938 hurricane. Jeff was able to get a nursery tree of the Scott apple cultivar from Bluffside Farm in Newport, Vermont, near where Susan grew up. Now Scott apples are flourishing in their orchard—a living memory of the past.
 
The lucky orchard has the benefit of their very own bees that Susan and Greg Mourneau of Grantham’s Daisy Hill Farm started keeping ten years ago. Susan loves springtime when she can see the orchard come alive with thousands of pollinating bees, hear their buzzing, and enjoy the heavenly aroma of the blossoms. But don’t wait until spring to visit King Blossom Farm. Take advantage now of the short picking season and head out to the farm and meet Jeff and Susan. They love to share their knowledge and passion for growing apples and fresh vegetables and creating other delights.
 
Here are links their website and more below:   kingblossomfarm.com/

Susan makes delicious products from the apples and vegetables they grow  and sells them in a little shop at their farm and on Etsy. Here  are some more links:

http://www.theheirloomgourmet.com/
https://www.facebook.com/kingblossomfarm  
https://www.facebook.com/theheirloomgourmet
https://www.instagram.com/theheirloomgourmet/
https://www.etsy.com/shop/TheHeirloomGourmet

​What I’m about to share with you is  going to blow your mind.
 
It all started with a purple mushroom growing in the Webb-Crowell Forest in Sutton. That bright purple color stopped me in my tracks and whetted my appetite for more. As I hiked with Kathy’s Friday Followers, we saw tons of mushrooms all along the trail—different colors, different shapes, different sizes. The biggest difficulty was not stepping on them.
 
Back home, I did a little research, and I learned that the mushrooms I saw were only a small part of the fungi. Most of their bodies are made up of a mass of thin threads known as a mycelium. Mushrooms bloom much like flowers do when conditions are right which explains why we saw so many in the recently-rained-on forest.
 
Up until the 1960, fungi were classified as plants, but it turns out they are more closely related to animals.  Their cell walls are made of chitlin which is also found in the exoskeleton of insects, crabs, and lobsters. They are now classified in their own kingdom separate from plants and animals.
 
The honey mushroom is considered the largest organism on Earth spreading across more than 2,000 acres of underground soil in Oregon. It’s estimated to be at least 2,400 years old.
 
According to the Encyclopedia of Biodiversity, "There are 75,000 fungal species that are named. But this number is believed to represent only 5% of the species that exist in nature."
 
There are over 30 species of mushroom that glow in the dark. The chemical reaction called bioluminescence produces a glowing light known as foxfire. People have been known to use these fungi to light their way through the woods.
 
I saved the most surprising fact for last: All fungi digest their food outside their bodies. The fungi find their food (say a fallen log), dump their enzymes on it, and the mycelium absorb the digested nutrients. How crazy is that?

Gardens are chock full of stories and here is a delightful one that I learned while walking around Paul Mercier’s garden with him and the previous owner, Janice Vien. Janice told us the story of the poppies that grow there in abundance. 
 
In 2003 Janice’s friend Pam Hanson gave her a plant grown from some poppy seeds that Pam found in an old olive jar that was marked “1984.”  Pam is certain that her grandmother Ruth Avery French had collected those seeds. Pam lives in the house where her grandmother had lived from 1957 to 1987. 
 
Everyone who drives through the main road in Grantham has seen the red clapboard farmhouse with pretty white trim and its beautiful garden. The house was formerly the parsonage for the Methodist Church (and Ruth’s husband Rev. Hollis French occasionally preached there in his retirement.) Pam has kept up her grandmother’s tradition and cultivates and maintains a gorgeous garden which every passerby admires.
 
The French family lore is that Ruth believed that hers were the illegal opium variety of poppies so she only told close friends about her suspicion for fear she would get in trouble with the law. Back in those days, Grantham had a population of fewer than 400 people. I can picture Mrs. French chuckling whenever she waved from her garden to the local policeman who would be oblivious to her criminal activity.
 
Pam showed me an article entitled Grantham’s Ruth French that was published in Newport’s Argus Champion’s April 5, 1978 edition. The article mentioned Ruth’s “ultra-exotic poppies” which means that descendants of her poppies have been growing in Grantham for at least 43 years.
 
In 2005 Janice planted the poppy seedling that Pam had given her.  Within a few summers, her land was peppered with poppies, all from that one gifted plant. They not only grew on the tiered garden where Janice planted that first one, but some of them managed to find their way across her dirt driveway and start their own colony there. Because they are self-seeding and with a little help from the wind to disperse their tiny black seeds, more show up every year. When Janice sold her place in 2018, she brought some of the poppies with her and now enjoys them at her new home.
 
Year ago, despite their age difference, Janice formed a close friendship with Ruth based on their mutual love of gardening. (Janice was in her 20’s and Ruth in her 80’s). Ruth often had Janice over for tea and cookies. They spent many afternoons chatting about flowers. Janice told me that when the poppies blossom, she always thinks of Ruth.
 
Paul Mercier is thrilled to have the poppies growing in his gardens and has given some plants away to other garden club friends—a common practice among gardeners.
 
Pam wonders what her grandmother would think if she knew that her illicit poppies have spread way beyond anyone’s control and now are on the loose in Grantham and probably beyond. I’d like to think it would make her chuckle.

When I drive out of Eastman’s main entrance, I often notice the pretty field with the impressive cairn directly across the street. Imagine my pleasure when, through serendipity, I met the owner Janice Vien, and she invited me to tour her land.
 
Janice recently retired after 32 years as a yoga instructor. To prepare for retirement, a few years ago Janice decided to sell her home of 18 years where she maintained beautiful, but labor intensive, gardens. (She sold the home to Paul Mercier.)
 
On her acre of land, Janice has a tiny apartment in the same building as her yoga studio. “At first, I thought I wouldn’t have a garden at all, just a field. Then I had second thoughts. I felt I had plant allies that I didn’t want to part with. So I dug up about 20 plants and started a small 4 x 28 foot garden. Some feel special to me because of their blue color like the Gentians. Others I love because they attract pollinators. Others, I just enjoy being in their presence.”
 
For those plants in the field outside her well cared for garden, Janice has a very “New Hampshire” philosophy about them: Live Free or Die. From what I saw first hand, the purple chicory, maroon cosmos, black-eyed Susan’s, daisies, goldenrod, pink phlox, thistle, coneflowers, and Queen Ann’s lace are not only living but thriving. Along with the sight and smell of flowers, we enjoyed the buzz of bees near her “Pollinator Work Zone” sign. 
 
Going from her fairly shady property to an open field has had a dramatic impact. For example, in 2004 she bought 10 white cedar trees from the NH State Forest Nursery through the Sullivan County UNH Extension Service. They were bare root cuttings which she planted around the frog pond in the woods beside her previous home. Those that survived grew only a few feet in 10 years. Since being transplanted to her sunny field, they’ve grown 6 feet in as many years. 
 
Janice had an unsightly, five-foot high, plastic septic vent pipe in her field. She built a wire cage with 4x4's and turkey wire to keep it vented and wanted to build a rock structure around it. Luckily her son Gabe and some of his friends visited and energetically went to work on it. First they moved all the rocks from a rock wall Janice had built at her other house. They then trucked the rocks to the site and erected the cairn.  According to Janice “They were just what I needed for this project: young healthy males trying to outdo each other. It was built in less than a day!” Now when you spot that large cairn as you drive on old Rte 10, you’ll know the rest of the story.
 
When I asked Janice about a tree that was decorated with shiny metallic bows, she explained that she tied 32 bows in memory of all the students she has taught with each bow representing a year. What a wonderful legacy for Janice. Not only has she helped so many plants stay healthy, but so many human beings as well.