Gardening with Men and Framed Embroidery

This is one of the pieces I finished years ago.  When I look at it now, I don't know how I had the patience, but I'm glad I did.  The phrasing is special to me, as I do love to garden.  I'm pretty shocked the colors haven't faded, but the fabric looks like it has moved a titch, there is almost a rhythm in the stitches to match the words and the sweet breeze from the birds' wings.  I used the bottom part of this embroidery piece to make the label button in the sidebar. 

When I was young, my backyard neighbors were an elderly couple. The man loved to garden and had a combination English Cottage style garden and then rows of precise and upright flowers.  He enjoyed everything about his garden.  The pear tree he had along the dividing fenceline gave us an abundance of delicious pears each year.  Our lilac bush grew up huge and he asked for cuttings to give to his wife.  Sometimes I think the request for lilacs was his way of thinking he was getting paid for his pears.  We used what fell in our yard and never crossed over the fence to take more.

He introduced me to foxgloves, lilies of the valley, bluebells, and other small delicate looking plants and foliage.  Between he, my grandfather who grew veggies, my uncle who was a powerhouse planter who grew, canned, and shared his harvests, and my father who planted our yard with roses, hedges, mimosa, forsythia, apple, lilac, poplar, pine, and more- I feel blessed to appreciate the work and the value in gardening and farming.  My  disappointment is that I can't do as much as I would like and every single houseplant that I have brought home to this house in the past seven years, has expired, nearly on contact.  I've never had that happen anywhere else, I think there must be something in the environment inside the house.  Bouquets of cut flowers don't last here, either.  My outside plants are growing well.

When we moved the last time, I had to give away my plants, that hurt, this was the only trip where things had to go into storage and obviously, plants can't live in storage.  Do you have a green thumb?