Gardening and Country Life in Glorious Color!

I’ve labored away adding lovely images to Shenandoah Watercolors, my nonfiction book about life on our small family farm in the beautiful Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. Given my love of gardening, this includes a strong focus on my gardens and love of nature. The book is already out in print with images, but now that kindle and nook E-Readers support colored photographs, I’ve added heaps more. Shenandoah Watercolors in available in  eBook and print format at Amazon and Barnes & Noble.  I will also get it up on Kobo soon. If someone is dying for me to have it somewhere else, let me know.

Book description: Author/farm wife Beth Trissel shares the joys and challenges of rural life on her family’s small farm in the scenic Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. Journey with her through the seasons on the farm, owned by the family since the 1930′s, and savor the richness of her cherished gardens and beloved valley. This journal, with images of her farm and valley, is a poignant, often humorous, sometimes sad glimpse into country life. Recommended for anyone who loves the country, and even those who don’t. ***Shenandoah Watercolors is a 2012 EPPIC eBOOK FINALIST.

Excerpt:  The heavy rain has given way to a misting drizzle, but streams of water pour down from the hills and make new ponds and creeks. It’s chilly with that raw wet feel. This spring is awash in moisture and amazing after last summer’s searing drought. I’m struck by the intense beauty around me, and I thought I was already seeing it, but it’s so much more somehow. The grass seems to shimmer, yet there’s no sun out today, and the meadow is so richly green it’s like seeing heaven. Our barnyard geese are enraptured, as much as geese can be, with all the grass. If there’s a lovelier place to revel in spring than the Shenandoah Valley and the mountains, I don’t know it. Narnia, maybe.I’ve been thinking about my favorite places.

The pool I like best lies in the woods near a place called Rip Rap Hollow in the Blue Ridge Mountains. A splendid falls cascades up above, but I like the pool far more. We always meant to go back, but never have. The cold water ripped through me like liquid ice and is as clear as melted crystal. I could see the rocks on the bottom, some slick with moss, others brown-gold in the light where the sun broke through the leafy canopy overhead. Trout hid beneath big rounded stones or ones that formed a cleft, but the men tickled them out to flash over the flat rocks strewn across the bottom like a path. Drifts of hay-scented fern rose around the edges of the pool, warming the air with the fragrance of new mown hay, and made the shady places a rich green.Now, that’s a good place to go in my mind when I’m troubled. The problem with cities is that people don’t learn what really matters. Don’t really feel or know the rhythms of the earth. When we are separated from that vital center place, we grow lost. Sadly, most people will never know what they are lost from, or where they can be found.~

***Images of the Shenandoah Valley in early spring and Dark Hollow Falls in the Blue Ridge.

An Adventure in Planting Pussy Willows--Beth Trissel

Last evening as the sun dipped behind the trees on the wooded hills above our farm, I set off with my trusty wheelbarrow heaped with pussy willows we’d rooted last year and wintered over in the garden–where they could not possibly remain–and a shovel. My aim, the farm pond in the meadow. Highly curious heifers with no regard for personal space followed at my heels like pet dogs. If I turned around, they were breathing down my neck. A little disconcerting, so I waved them back. Repeatedly. I was also slightly concerned about chancing upon a coyote, but decided with this lot keeping me company that wasn’t likely. Might not have been anyway, but coyotes do visit the meadow when making their rounds late in the evening or at night. Rarely in the day.

My two farm dogs chose not to go with me on this particular venture. Wise. I had to toss the pussy willows, contained in feed sacks after I dug them out of the garden, and my shovel over not one, but two, electric fences and then roll beneath the wire to reach the grassy edge of the water. For those of you who think it’s easy to dig in wet muck sucking at your shovel and your boots, I can assure you that it’s not. Already worn out after a day of overdoing it in the garden, this final endeavor took the last of my reserves. And I sank in the squelchy mud up to my boot tops.  Then my knees. Digging and clawing my way along, I shifted clumps of saturated grass and oook to get my plants into place. Then heaved myself back up the bank to the meadow and pushed my barrow home. A task I desired to accomplish before dark so I could still see the electric fences, installed, btw, to keep the cows out of the pond.

If the pussy willows are happy there, we will have lovely catkins next spring. Supposedly, they prefer swampy places and the edges of streams, so this spot ought to suit them. But I reserved one to plant someplace else, just in case.

As ever, I am in pursuit of Eden on earth. My own bit of heaven. And I have the aching back to prove it.

(***Images of Lance in the muddy creek near the pond, and daughter Elise on a different outing. And our oh so friendly cows. To be expected, really, as they were hand raised and bottle fed, etc).

I did a search on pussy willow quotes and found this rather unusual one: ““Everything that anyone would ever look for is usually where they find it.”
― Margaret Wise Brown

I have no idea how that relates to pussy willows, but liked the quote. I hope to find my willows where I planted them, growing happily. I shall report back.

"The fragrance always stays in the hand that gives the rose." ~George William Curtis

“The rose speaks of love silently, in a language known only to the heart.”

*Roses from my garden

“You are responsible, forever, for what you have tamed. You are responsible for your rose.”  Antoine de Saint-Exupery

I'd rather have roses on my table than diamonds on my neck.  ~Emma Goldman

To be overcome by the fragrance of flowers is a delectable form of defeat.  ~Beverly Nichols

“A single rose can be my garden...a single friend, my world.” ~Leo Buscaglia

"Perfumes are the feelings of flowers."

 ~Heinrich Heine, The Hartz Journey

"Give me odorous at sunrise a garden of beautiful flowers where I can walk

undisturbed." ~Walt Whitman

"I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers."

~Claude Monet

“Love is like the wild rose-briar; Friendship like the holly-tree. The holly is dark when the rose-briar blooms, but which will bloom most constantly?” 
― Emily Brontë, The Complete Poems

"A profusion of pink roses bending ragged in the rain speaks to me of all gentleness and its enduring."  ~The Collected Later Poems of William Carlos Williams

'"People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us."

~Iris Murdoch, A Fairly Honourable Defeat

“But he that dares not grasp the thorn Should never crave the rose.”~Anne Bronte

"And she was fair as is the rose in May." ~ Geoffrey Chaucer

“They are not long, the days of wine and roses. Out of a misty dream, our path emerges for a while, then closes, within a dream.” 
― Ernest Dowson, The Poems and Prose of Ernest Dowson

Don't Trust Just Anyone With Your Ducks

Years ago, I raised ducks for our farm pond–a story in itself–and then decided to take on several ducklings offered to me by a kindergarten teacher who hatched them in the classroom incubator and needed a home for the little quackers. I housed them safely in an unused dog kennel and decided to raise them for friends who have a smaller pond on their farm. One was a white Peking duck and the other two were white with markings, probably some mixed up kind of ducks.

Oh, the care and effort I put into those ducklings and the pride to see them thrive and grow into bright-eyed, trusting souls who greeted me eagerly. Ducks have lots to say and these were especially friendly. And handsome. But after generously gifting my feathered friends to human friends, I later learned they hadn’t received the care I assumed they would, nor were they checked on regularly.  No food was forthcoming, or water provided when the pond dwindled from drought. That hadn’t occurred to anyone. In fact, I was casually informed the ducks were nowhere to be found. Their disappearance wasn’t even noted at any particular time. Not that anyone was concerned, of course. Except me. Why had I let them go to such a negligent home?

Earlier this summer, my 2011 art major graduate daughter Elise was entrusted with a tiny aloe vera plant that was on its last leg, or leaf, by a college friend of hers. Between the two of us, this pathetic specimen has made an amazing comeback, and we both revel in its progress. Now, my conscientious daughter is making noises about giving it back. ‘What?’ I say. ‘To the negligent plant person?’ It’s gonna be the duck thing all over again.

To those of you without much fondness for ducks or plants, this lesson can be cross-applied to anything you’ve put time and effort into nurturing.  Don’t entrust what you care about to just anybody. This also includes your kids.

A Gardener is An Eternal Optimist

'Gardening is not a rational act.' ~Margaret Atwood

Given our most trying weather of late, I agree with that sentiment, but will never give up. I just reassess. The picture of me on the right of this blog was taken beneath our lovely apricot tree that fell during last week’s fierce windstorm. Many trees and plants went down in that blast. Next spring a new apricot will go into the ground.

It is ever my wish to have a garden like Mr. McGregor‘s, but I must remember that his was in England and did not undergo the brutal trials that have beset  mine. Weather in the Shenandoah Valley swings between the extremes of north and south in the most erratic manner, and is very hard on plants.  Try as I might, only the strong survive.  And sometimes, not even them.

Most of you know me as a writer, and so I am, but I’m a gardener first. My thoughts ever turn to how the plants fare and I grieve when they suffer. Every spring I truly believe this year I will triumph, this year I will not be undone by the vagaries of nature, and each year I have my moments of glory and disappointment. But there’s always next season. And I still hold out hope for a splendid fall. For now, I’m salvaging what  I can.

‘A garden must combine the poetic and the mysterious with a feeling of serenity and joy.’  ~Luis Barragan

‘A good garden may have some weeds.’ ~Thomas Fuller

‘A man has made at least a start on discovering the meaning of human life when he plants shade trees under which he knows full well he will never sit.’ ~D. Elton Trueblood

’A weed is a plant that has mastered every survival skill except for learning how to grow in rows.’ ~Doug Larson

‘All gardening is landscape painting.’ ~William Kent

‘But if each man could have his own house, a large garden to cultivate and healthy surroundings – then, I thought, there will be for them a better opportunity of a happy family life.’ ~George Cadbury

‘Flowers always make people better, happier, and more helpful; they are sunshine, food and medicine for the soul.’ ~Luther Burbank

‘Garden as though you will live forever.’ ~William Kent

‘God Almighty first planted a garden. And indeed, it is the purest of human pleasures.’~Francis Bacon

***Pre-storm photographs taken by my daughter Elise

If You Love the Country and Even If You Don't

Written in a month by month journal style, my award-winning nonfiction book, Shenandoah Watercolors, follows a year in my life on our farm in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia.

Excerpt from May:

“The quality of mercy is not strained,

It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven,

Upon the place beneath; it is twice blessed;

It blesseth him that gives and him that takes…”

~William Shakespeare

The heavy rain has given way to a misting drizzle, but streams of water pour down from the hills and make new ponds and creeks. It’s chilly with that raw wet feel. This spring is awash in moisture and amazing after last summer’s searing drought. I’m struck by the intense beauty around me, and I thought I was already seeing it, but it’s so much more somehow. The grass seems to shimmer, yet there’s no sun out today, and the meadow is so richly green it’s like seeing heaven.

Our barnyard geese are enraptured, as much as geese can be, with all the grass. If there’s a lovelier place to revel in spring than the Shenandoah Valley and the mountains, I don’t know it. Narnia, maybe.

I’ve been thinking about my favorite places. The pool I like best lies in the woods near a place called Rip Rap Hollow in the Blue Ridge Mountains. A splendid falls cascades up above, but I like the pool far more. We always meant to go back, but never have. The cold water ripped through me like liquid ice and is as clear as melted crystal.

I could see the rocks on the bottom, some slick with moss, others brown-gold in the light where the sun broke through the leafy canopy overhead. Trout hid beneath big rounded stones or ones that formed a cleft, but the men tickled them out to flash over the flat rocks strewn across the bottom like a path. Drifts of hay-scented fern rose around the edges of the pool, warming the air with the fragrance of new-mown hay, and made the shady places a rich green.

Now, that’s a good place to go in my mind when I’m troubled. The problem with cities is that people don’t learn what really matters. Don’t really feel or know the rhythms of the earth. When we are separated from that vital center place, we grow lost. Sadly, most people will never know what they are lost from, or where they can be found.~

Only .99 in kindle at Amazon, Shenandoah Watercolors is also out in print with lovely photographs taken by my talented family.

"This is perhaps the most beautifully written memoir I've ever read. Its lovely and languid descriptions of the picturesque valley, the farm and gardens are equaled only by the charming and funny descriptions of the antics (and conversations!) of the farm animals. What a joy this is to read..." Amazon Reviewer C. G. King

What do Allergies, Herbs & History All Have in Common?

Me.  Most definitely.

Being passionate about the past, I relish a connection to those who’ve gone before us.  I’m fascinated with history and love old homes, historic sites, all that ties us to the richness of bygone ages. Intrigued with herbal lore, I often use it in my writing.  Herbs influenced every facet of life in pre-modern times and have changed little over the centuries. 

When I hold an aromatic sprig of rosemary in my hand, I’m touching the same plant beloved by the ancients. Some heirloom roses hail from the glory days of Rome. Amazing.  Awe inspiring.   At least to me, and I suspect to many of you as well.

To further that sense of oneness, and for their many uses, I grow a variety of herbs. Thyme, basil, sage, and chives are a few in my kitchen garden. Lavender and scented geraniums are wonderful for their scent alone. Ladies once wafted the delicate perfume of toilet water. Porcelain bowls filled with colorful potpourri scented musty parlors.

"I judge that the flowers of lavender quilted in a cappe and dayly worn are good for all diseases of the head that come of a cold cause and that they comfort the braine very well." ~Lavender and Turner (Herbal, 1545)

Before taking the leap into penning historical/paranormal romances, I wrote vignettes on rural life. I’ve compiled these into a memoir on gardening and country life, Shenandoah Watercolors, a 2012 EPIC eBOOK Award finalist available at Amazon in kindle, and now print, with beautiful photographs from my talented family.

At one time, I had a modest herb business and gave talks on herbal lore to local groups much as Julia Maury did in my light paranormal romance Somewhere My Love.

Back to my herbal enterprise, with the faithful assistance of my long-suffering mother we grew and dried herbs and flowers for wreath making and potpourri which we sold in the fall. Herbs and heirloom flower seedlings were raised in the small greenhouse my hubby built me and sold in the spring. 

Any profits were swiftly overrun by subsequent visits to the allergist,whom I’ve seen regularly for years now and still get four shots at a crack. It seems I developed every allergy latent within me by exposure to all these pollens.

*Note, If you’re allergic to ragweed, avoid an herb called Sweet Annie and the Artemisia family. But I’m considered to rank in the top ten percent of allergy sufferers in the nation, so what are the odds of that?

After being run indoors and my gardening curtailed, I took up writing and have used my love of plants there. I’m still an avid gardener, though with shots, meds and limits. 

*And yes, I do use local honey made from our wildflowers that's supposed to aid in building my pollen tolerance. I think it may be helping some. I'll report back, but hard to say for certain as I'm also on the shots.

Out in Print with Lovely Images--Shenandoah Watercolors!

At long last Shenandoah Watercolors is out in print!   My talented daughter Elise labored hours and hours to design the layout and incorporate her and my mom, Pat Churchman, and husband Dennis's beautiful photographs of the Shenandoah Valley and mountains.  Also a few vintage images from times past.  

A lovely coffee table sized book, Shenandoah Watercolors should be a joy to those who want to savor the images and linger with me in my beloved valley.

The book is available at Amazon, and I authorized other outlets for it as well but am not sure where it many show up for sale.  The cost is as inexpensive as we could possibly make it for a book of this size with so many colored images.  We won't get rich, that's for sure, but hope to share our love of the country, of our valley and the mountains, of family and all that's good.  And God bless those who join us.

Some People Like Peanut butter Pie, Some Don’t

In the South, luscious diet-busting peanut butter pie is the pride of local eateries. Especially the small mom and pop sorts of diners and restaurants.  If you can call Fat Boys Pork Palace a restaurant.  Folks drive over the twisted roads through the Allegheny Mountains to savor the peanut butter pie at Fat Boys.  And our favorite little diner, Thomas House, in the nearby town of Dayton makes wonderful pies of all sorts, but peanut butter is the best ever.

However, to my amazement, a good friend of mine, a transplant from the Midwest,  doesn’t adore it.  Won’t even allow a creamy bite passed her lips. How can this be,  I ask myself?  She also doesn’t like the peanut butter cookies with the Hershey’s Kisses in the center either.  Practically my favorite kind.  But she does love peanut butter, so that’s not it.  Go figure.

All of which brings me to my point–yes, I have one.  People vary wildly in their likes and dislikes, which is a factor I need to bear in mind when I get bad reviews. Outlandish as that may seem, I sometimes do.  I know, boggles the mind.

No, I can’t give you Fat Boy’s  or Thomas House peanut butter pie recipes because they guard them with their lives.  *My daughter has a T-shirt that says, ‘I pigged out at Fat Boy’s Pork Palace.’

Let's Call It Spring~

At long last, today is the first of March.  After spending much of January and most all of February sick with one thing or another, I tottered forth into the sunshine and managed to accomplish a few much-needed errands.  Now I’m whacked and feeling it’s time for a nap.  That’s what seemingly endless virus’s will do to a body.  Considering I’m not the only sufferer in the Shenandoah Valleyor the country, I think most everyone except the die-hard skiing fanatics would agree that what we all need is SPRING!  A tonic to mind, body, and spirit.

To that end, I point out the snow crocus and snowdrops blooming here and there in sheltered spots of my yard and garden.    Welcome green shoots of crocus, daffodils, tulips…are pushing up through the earth most everywhere, and tomorrow the weather is to be sunny and 60 degrees.   The pussy willow is bursting forth with catkins, and fussy barnyard geese are laying eggs.   I conclude it’s early spring and much prefer that term to ‘late winter.’  Far more mood brightening.

In keeping with the season, I’m sorting through boxes stuffed with envelopes of seeds leftover from the past year or two and ordering more (we count our wealth in seeds) as well as potatoes, strawberries, culinary herbs and all things garden.   Which as far as I’m concerned equals all things good as any true gardener will agree.  I also save seed, am a big fan of  heirloom seeds, and have been known to share  so I’m not simply hording my treasure trove.

An excellent place to be for those in want of  plants is out in the garden with me on a fine spring day while I divide perennials and thin overly generous larkspur, love in a mist, and poppy seedlings…I’ll soon tire, allowing them to take over certain spots of the garden, but in the beginning I’m imbued with the determination that this year all will be in order.  I soon concede to a more wildflower look and justify many of the weeds as ‘kind of pretty.’  We definitely have a wildlife habitat here, another justification for the unkempt tangle that encroaches as the season unfolds.  But now, all is fresh, new, and filled with promise.

In my search of every more seeds on the internet I came across an interesting site with images of vintage seed packets for sale:http://www.seedart.com/flowers.html

The Virginia House-Wife Cookbook, circa 1825, and Old English Plum Pudding

I came across this antiquated volume tucked back in among my collection of cookbooks.  I vaguely recall someone, maybe my husband, thinking I would appreciate its quaint take on cookery and the role of women in that far-flown age.  I did, but then The Virginia House-wife got lost behind the other larger books and forgotten.  Yes, it’s definitely from another age.

To quote from the author, Mrs. Mary Randolph, also known as The Methodical Cook, as she calls herself, “The grand areanum of management lies in three simple rules: “Let everything be done at a proper time, keep everything in its proper place, and put everything to its proper use.”


“If the mistress of the family will every morning examine minutely the different departments of her household, she must detect errors in their infant state…early rising is essential to the good government of a family.  A late breakfast deranges the whole business of the day…when the family breakfasts by detachments, the table remains a tedious time;  the servants are kept from their morning’s meal…No work can be done until the breakfast is finished. The Virginia ladies who are proverbially good managers employ themselves while the servants are eating…arranging the cruets, the mustard, salt-sellers, pickle vases,  and all that apparatus for the dinner table. “


“The husband who can ask a friend to partake of his dinner in full  confidence of finding his wife unruffled by the petty vexations attendant on the neglect of household duties, who can usher his guest into the dining room assured of seeing that methodical nicety which is the essence of true elegance,  will feel pride and exultation in the possession of a companion who gives to his home charms that gratify every wish of his soul…”

And so on regarding the attainment of perfection for married women. And you thought this was just a cookbook.  No, it’s also a moral treatise on the expectations heaped on new housewives.  But I detected one vital element that helps make this ideal state attainable, SERVANTS!

Amazon, that has everything, also has The Virginia House-wife and says it was originally published in 1825, so we have a later reprint from 1897. Of the book, it states, “The Virginia House-Wife was the most influential cookbook in nineteenth-century America. Considered the ultimate how-to cookbook, it rivals some of the currently popular cookbooks with its commonsense knowledge and advice which remains practical to this day.”
Well, maybe not ALL of its advice remains practical, but it’s chocked full of recipes and quite interesting to read over.

A Recipe for Old English Plum Pudding from The Virginia House-Wife Cookbook:

Beat eight eggs very light, add to them a pound of flour sifted, and a pound of powdered sugar; when it looks quite light, put in a pound of suet finely shredded, a pint of milk, a nutmeg grated, and a gill of brandy; mix with a pound of dried currants, and a pound of raisins stoned and floured--tie in a thick cloth and boil it steadily for eight hours. 

A variation of that theme is called just Plum Pudding:
Take a pound of best flour, sift it, and make it up before sunrise, with six eggs beaten light; a large spoonful of good yeast, and as much milk as will make it the consistency of bread (dough); let it rise well, knead into it a half pound of butter, put in a grated nutmeg, with one and a half pounds of raisins stoned and cut up; mix well together, wet the cloth, flour it, and tie it loosely, that the pudding may have room to rise. *Raisins for pudding  or cakes should be rubbed in a little flour  to prevent their settling to the bottom--see that it does not stick to them in lumps.   *Cloths for boiling puddings should be made of German sheeting; an article less thick will admit water and injure the pudding.

She doesn't say anything more than this.  I'm assuming this pudding is also to be boiled for the above mentioned eight hours.  I never made either but thought they looked fascinating.  In doing more investigation on English plum pudding, I came across a wonderful account and old recipe with more details.  He says to cover the pot in which you're boiling the pudding and check to be sure it doesn't boil dry: http://www.homemade-dessert-recipes.com/plum-pudding-recipe.html