Flower Beds, Windowsills & Botanicals

 Even as a child, I loved flowers, and every summer, my father dug up a flower bed for me beside our home in Clarksburg, West Virginia. I planted seeds for annuals ordered from the Burpee catalog. The fact that I knew the name of every flower in that catalog by the age of ten, made me a wonder child to my Manhattan-bred mother.  

At my Chautauqua summer home, I spent decades trying to tame four wildly-growing perennial beds and loved and begrudged the time with bees and worms, stolen from my studio.

 In Cleveland, my windowsills are now my gardens. I have come to admire and learn from the masters of Botanicals. Each clivia, orchid, amaryllis, and narcissus is a challenge to grow and bring to flower, a wonder to watch and then, humbly, to paint. 

Gloria Plevin