Tuesday, October 8, 2013

Bar Harbor, Maine - Why we're traveling with a shrub

And no, I don't mean a house plant - we're traveling with a shrub.


The story of Frosty:

Our shrub's name (of course he has a name!) is Frosty the Snowball Bush. His story begins many years ago...in the early 1900s, when a great uncle of Bill's brought a snowball bush over to the new world from Poland. I imagine that original shrub's journey was even more adventurous, be somehow it persevered. Cuttings from the "grandfather shrub" found their way into the backyards of his children and other relatives, all descendants of that well traveled plant. Eventually, Bill's cousin Fred planted one in the backyard of his home in Downer's Grove. Fred then started a lovely tradition of bringing a cutting of the snowball bush to each member of the extended family to plant in his or her backyard. So each of us had beautiful flowering snowball bushes every Spring, reminding us of that long-ago voyage.

When Bill and I were getting ready to embark on our own "voyage" a few weeks ago, Fred brought us a cutting from his snowball bush. Since our daughter Bethany and I were going to road-trip all our furnishings out to Olympia WA to put in storage, the original plan was that we would take the new cutting (newly named Frosty) with us and plant him in Bethany's backyard. When we eventually have a house again, we would then take a cutting from that one and plant it in our yard, thus two birds with one stone - both of our homes would be graced with a beautiful shrub. Well, sometimes plans go awry - the cab of the moving truck we were in was simply not going to accommodate the shrub and we had to leave him behind at our temporary rental in Naperville with Bill. But never fear - we nurtured Frosty along for the next few weeks, planted him in a large pot and decided he would go on the road with us. So he rides in the kitchen sink when we're underway and sits outside the moho when we're camped somewhere. He looks pretty happy, doesn't he? And that's the story of Frosty.


1 comment:

  1. Not unusual to see all sorts of plants coming out of homes when on the road. Frosty should enjoy the trip and think about all the stories Frosty will be able to tell the other plants in the garden.

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