FLOWERS FOSTER FRIENDS
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The pink-petaled coneflowers, cerulean salvias and persimmon-hued zinnias that filled my Waterford vases last month have lost their signature summer majesty. In fact, they look quite awful in their withering dotage.
So I amble through the backyard with my Fiskars, hoping to discover that the asters are about to burst into bloom. They’re not quite ready, so instead I snip an armful of blushing hydrangeas and place them on the coffee table. Suddenly, the room looks sunny and bright… Alive!
Years ago in a book whose title I’ve since forgotten, I read a phrase that stuck with me: given the choice of buying a baguette and brie or a bouquet of violets, a Parisian housewife would invariably — if not always — opt for the flowers. I adore brie but there’s something magical about flowers. As American botanist Luther Burbank wrote, “Flowers always make people better, happier and more helpful; they are sunshine, food and medicine for the soul.”
That sentiment resounded this past week when I was driving along Main Street in Kennebunk and spotted several wooden planters filled with yellow and pink blossoms, plus lush greenery cascading to the sidewalk. The boxes flanked the entrance to a breakfast and lunch eatery called Bev’s Cafe which sits on the first floor of the weathered red brick Masonic Hall, right in the aorta of Kennebunk, “the only village in the world so named.”
Hand-constructed by Nate Norris, co-owner of Bev’s with his wife Annie Callan, the flower boxes overflow with pink marguerites and yellow wedelias, all selected, planted, nourished, watered and dead-headed gratuitously by Sarah, their upstairs neighbor and friend.
Nate explained, “Sarah lives in a condo above our restaurant. When she moved here, she told us she missed the gardens she used to tend at her prior home. So together we came up with an idea — if I built the planters, she would fill them as a labor of love.”
Bev’s Cafe showcases three different plantings during the year: Spring, Summer and Fall. Nate and his wife Annie pay for the flowers and soil, Sarah applies her expert green thumb, and this flowering friendship brings joy to all who drive along Main Street.
What an antidote to the nastiness and violence we read about every morning when we open our newspapers or iPhones. What a quiet act of kindness in a world gone crazy with gunshots, audible hatred and mockery. It doesn’t have to be this way. In those wonderful melodic words of Bette Midler: "I say love, it is a flower. And you, its only seed.
