No. 027: High Maintenance.

On making the world more beautiful.

Have you heard of the Lupine Lady?

Her name is Alice, and she’s the main character of Barbara Cooney’s timelessly charming storybook Miss Rumphius. We meet Alice at the beginning of the book as a young girl living in a seaside town alongside her grandfather, who had long ago immigrated to America on a large sailing ship before retiring to work as an artist.

“When I grow up,” Alice tells her grandfather, “I too will go to faraway places, and when I grow old, I too will live beside the sea.”

“That is all very well, little Alice,” responds her grandfather, “but there is a third thing you must do.”

“What is that?”

“You must do something to make the world more beautiful.”

Alice grows older, and throughout her adult life she voyages to many faraway places, enjoys many remarkable adventures, and makes many new friends. However, a back injury ultimately brings her days of world travel to an end, and just as she had promised, she settles back down in a town by the sea. When she moves into her new house, she plants a little garden, and after a hard first winter, she is delighted come spring to see through her window a patch of blue and purple and rose-colored lupines blooming up from the stony ground.

This excites Miss Rumphius with an idea: She hurries to order five bushels of lupine seed from the finest seed house, and over the course of a summer she walks all the paths of her small, seaside town, scattering seeds wherever she goes.

The following spring, the whole town blossoms with lupines alongside every country road and surrounding every building. “Miss Rumphius had done the third, the most difficult thing of all!” writes Cooney—she had made the world more beautiful.

Miss Rumphius (1985), written and illustrated by Barbara Cooney.

A little less than a year ago, my husband and I went under contract on the house that’s now our home, and as we counted down the days until closing, I was counting up dreams for how I wanted to make it our own. The previous owners had taken good care of the property, but I could still see much potential to cultivate its beauty.

Taking a page out of Alice Rumphius’s book, I enthusiastically ordered several packets of native, perennial wildflower seeds, and on the very day we closed I scattered them in the established yet underplanted flowerbed lining the western face of the house. It was an inexpensive, low effort way, I figured, to invite a touch of loveliness into this space that was now ours to work and keep.

Of course, with any low effort project, one might anticipate a low reward, but in this case that’s not what transpired—and that is to say, in this case, the low effort project resulted in, well, no reward. Not a single cotyledon peek-a-booed through the soil, and much less did a flower ever bloom. In my quest to be like the Lupine Lady, all I got was a Lesson Learned. Womp womp.

Even so, I have still dreamt of a home surrounded by flowers, and so this spring I am trying again—only this time I’m doing it the right way, with seed starting trays, a heat mat for germination, grow lights, and an oscillating fan for better airflow. I have the whole situation set up inside a wooden box I built years ago as a chick brooder, the inside of which I’ve lined with aluminum foil in order to maximize the effectiveness of the grow lights. It looks like an unhinged science fair project, but so far the seedlings are thriving.

Among the seventeen varieties of flowers, herbs, and vegetables I’ve sown, I included a couple rows of lupines. And lupines, as it turns out, are a bit more high maintenance than Miss Rumphius had led me to believe. First, the shell of each individual seed must be “scarified,” or lightly nicked with shears or a sharp knife, before being planted. Each cell of the seed starting tray is planted with at least three seeds in hopes that at least one will germinate, but a few of the cells I planted experienced no germination at all, and in the ones that did I had to truncate all but one of the seedlings in order to prioritize the one that looked the healthiest. In total I scarified and sowed fifty lupine seeds, but as a result of the multiple steps of thinning involved in the process, I’m left with only ten seedlings to plant in the ground once the weather warms up.

Lupines are far from the only high maintenance seed. The black-eyed Susans and coneflowers had to be mixed with damp sand and stored in the refrigerator for several weeks before planting, and the lavender seeds are currently in the refrigerator as well, wrapped in a moist paper towel. Even for the seeds that didn’t require special treatment before starting, I had to ensure the planting depth in each tray cell was exactly right for that variety of seed, and then I used the tip of a wooden skewer to pick up each tiny seed and place it gently on top of the soil. Now, every day, I check to see which tray cells need to be watered—very carefully, with a gooseneck can, so as not to upset the fragile roots—and I rotate all the trays so the light can hit all sides of the seedlings. Raising baby plants, I’ve now learned, is a pretty labor intensive process.

I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised that cultivating horticultural beauty would involve so much effort. As a printmaker, I’m well acquainted with the disciplined attention and precision required to produce a beautiful batch of even the most basic linocut prints. And as a woman, I’m well acquainted with the reality that most of what’s peddled as “natural” beauty by mass media in reality demands a considerable amount of maintenance and expense. More often than not the scenes we identify as “effortlessly beautiful” are the ones that required the most effort of all to produce.

Credit: Cartoons Hate Her. Not trying to make a serious statement here—this cartoon just always makes me laugh!

Everyone knows you only reap what you sow, but sometimes we focus so much on the what, we forget to acknowledge the how—and yet the how of sowing beauty into the world often requires a significant amount of labor that doesn’t feel very beautiful at all. An image of strolling bucolic hills, tossing seeds straight into the grass, makes for a delightful children’s story, but it’s far from instructive for how to make real flowers grow.

When I was still on Instagram, there was a certain type of content I frequently saw that made me feel somewhat rage-y. There were many variations, but this was the basic recipe: a sentimental yet moralizing quote about motherhood (“Let me never forget how magical it is to be busy with the life I once dreamed of!”) superimposed over an illustration, probably by Lore Pemberton, of a mother in a gingham house dress, baking cinnamon rolls with a mop-headed toddler, while a little girl in a Fair Isle sweater sits at a table nearby crafting colorful paper chains and snow gently falls on the other side of the window of their whimsically rustic farmhouse. You get the picture.

I’m sure there are women who find this type of content encouraging and edifying, and I’m glad for them, but I am not one of them. It’s not that I’m opposed to the sentiment: I know many women, myself certainly included, who need regular encouragement to practice gratitude for the labor of motherhood. However, many of these women—again, myself certainly included—struggle to practice gratitude precisely because the motherhood they once dreamed of did look like the Lore Pemberton version, and yet the motherhood they’re now living usually looks more like scratching sticker residue off furniture with the chipped fingernails of one hand, while the other hand tries to break up a physical altercation that arose between two children over the correct pronunciation of “Wisconsin,” and a voice from four rooms away hollers, “Mom! Where are the batteries? Mom! I need four batteries for a science experiment! Mom! Mooom?” (Also we need to leave for church in three minutes.)

It’s easy to wax sentimental about “a house full of noise” or “messy little hands”—not so much about blood-curdling tantrums in the middle of the grocery aisle or little hands that are messy as a result of drawing with permanent marker across the hardwood floor. All that is to say, sometimes the labor of motherhood feels magical and whimsical and beautiful, but very often it does not. And that is okay!—it doesn’t have to in order still to be worth something great.

Lately I’m recognizing that Barbara Cooney was right: making the world more beautiful is a difficult task. The things that make this world a beautiful place—gardens; pieces of art; human bodies; inviting homes; healthy families, churches, and communities—more often than not are very high maintenance things, and just because this maintenance sometimes leaves you feeling weary, overwhelmed, frustrated, or bored doesn’t mean you’re doing it wrong. The work you are doing is holy work. God makes everything beautiful in its time (Ecclesiastes 3:11), and your labor is not in vain.

Keep sowing, friends. You’re doing great.

Over the past couple months I’ve had the honor of working alongside the ministry Geneva Benefits Group to create a custom linocut design they can use as a gift for donors toward their Monthly Giving campaign, the proceeds of which go toward their Relief Fund ministry. Geneva Benefits Group, which is an agency of the Presbyterian Church in America, “supports the wellbeing of ministry leaders, workers, and their families, so they can live generously in every season of ministry.” Their Relief Fund ministry provides urgent assistance to PCA pastors and their families, widows, and ministry workers facing unexpected hardships.

The design we landed on features the key verse of the campaign, James 1:27: “Religion that God our Father accepts as blameless is this: to look after widows and orphans in their distress.” The verse is framed by a lily, as a nod to Jesus’ affirmation of God’s care for his children, which surpasses the splendor of the lilies of the field (Matthew 6:28–30).

As a ministry wife myself, it meant a lot to me to have an opportunity to use my artwork in a way that might serve families similar to my own in their times of greatest need. If this is a cause that stirs your heart as well, consider becoming a Sustainer of the good work Geneva Benefits Group is doing.

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Over the past several months, I’ve been busy with a series of commissioned opportunities, including the one just described. These have all been incredibly life-giving, and it means the world to me when people trust my creative process to produce work that will serve their desired purposes.

I feel ready for a break, though, so I’m taking a little time off from commissioned projects in order to work on some fun, “just for me” projects. One such project I had a blast bringing to life this month was a large, soft-pastel depiction of Glacier National Park. The process of working with soft pastels couldn’t be more different from that of working with linocut, so it felt wonderful to stretch some creative muscles I don’t typically get to exercise.

Although I’m presently occupying myself with spring-planted seeds, back in the fall I pursued another labor-intensive horticultural endeavor, planting a hundred crocus bulbs and a hundred and fifty daffodil bulbs in a couple of our front yard beds. The purple and yellow blooms are all coming up now, and I cannot overstate how much joy they’re giving me. Therefore, this month I’m giving away one of my 8x10” daffodil prints, so I can pass on a little of my joy.

Click the button below and fill out the form by Sunday, March 1, if you’d like to be entered in the drawing! Note that this giveaway is only open to subscribers, so if you haven’t yet subscribed, make sure to do so first (subscribing comes with a couple other perks too!).

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Thanks for reading! Until next time—

Holly