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Floating Hellebores and Pieris came by for a Spring photo on this day of 21 March 2025 Gatehouse treat and a vintage English Dish kindness of Nancy D. |
Celebrate the Vernal Equinox at Sunrise as the
Celebration of New Beginnings,
the Reawakening of Nature & the moment
when the Time of Light becomes greater
than the Time of Dark.
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"The vegetable life does not content itself with casting from the flower or the tree, a single seed, but it fills the air and earth with a prodigality of seeds, that if thousands perish, thousands may plant themselves, that hundreds may come up, that tens may live to maturity, that, or least, one may replace the parent." Ralph Waldo Emerson Extracted from "The Triumph of Seeds" by Thor Hanson Signed copy from the library of Gatehouse Seeds, Shaw Island, San Juan Archipelago, WA. Wild Douglas Aster seed harvest of 2024. More about this easy-street, wild perennial, wildflower, loved by many pollinators - can be seen here. |
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Fresh local seed packets available at the Gatehouse roadside shed, Reefnet Bay Road, Shaw Island, San Juan Archipelago, WA. |
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Merry Christmas Greetings and thank you for the great year! The Shaw Island Gatehouse. |
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"All the complicated details of the attiring and the disattiring are completed! A liquid moon moves gently among the long branches. Thus having prepared their buds against a sure winter the wise trees stand sleeping in the cold." |
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Warm Shaw Island Colors November 2024 |
"More often than not, there is a certain relief when summer is over. It so seldom lives up to our exaggerated expectations. But autumn is a season of which nobody ever expects or remembers much and it can thus spring on us frequent and pleasant surprises."
The late, great English writer/gardener Christopher Lloyd,"OH, THE SUMMER NIGHT
HAS A SMILE OF LIGHT
& SHE SITS ON A SAPPHITE THRONE."
Barry Cornwall
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WELSH POPPY (Papaver cambricum) Seed collecting and flowers blooming Gatehouse seed shed, Reefnet Bay Road, Shaw Island, WA. June 2024 |
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CAROL'S FOXGLOVES (Digitalis purpurea, mixed.) Gatehouse Garden, Reefnet Cove Road, Shaw Island, San Juan Archipelago, WA. 1 June 2018. See packets available at the stand. |
"Some of the common names of the foxglove, Digitalis purpurea, date back to early days when fairies and evil spirits were familiar presences, while others have a Christian character. They are folk's gloves, witches' gloves, fairy gloves, fairy caps, fairy thimbles, dead men's bells, bloody fingers, and gloves of our lady. Because the plants are biennial, in their first year they produce only the basal rosette of leaves.
During the second summer stems four feet high [+] appear, bearing a spire two feet long of nodding two-lipped flowers that grow on one side of the stem. The entire plant is softly hairy. When grown in semi-shade or sparse woods, conditions similar to its wild haunts, foxglove will self-sow freely.
Helen M. Fox, The Years in my Herb Garden©1953 by the Macmillan Co.
