An evening with Annie

My mom wanted to attend a gardening lecture last night, so I drove her to the event.
I figured a lecture had to be dry, right?
But I figured I'd go so my mom could be there.

Dry? Not even close.

The speaker was Annie Hayes from Annie's Annuals, a company in Northern California devoted to providing "rare, unusual annuals & perennial plants, including cottage garden heirlooms & hard to find California native wildflowers".

Annie is passionate and full of life.
So filled with a sense of wonder and joy.
She was giddy about her flowers, and had really interesting information about how species are being changed so they look good in the stores in their little four-inch pots, but how in nature they are actually three feet tall, undulate in the wind, and have a wonderful charm.

The manufactured hybrid dwarf varieties she calls "boinks".
All trendy in your garden, boink-boink-boink.
Dumb little blobs.
No character. No charm.

Her acreage though boy, now that's charm.
"Girly-licious", she calls it.

With an impish grin, she says, "Don't you stay up late on the internet looking at plants? I do. It's plant porn."

No wonder at her parties, there are helium balloons tied to plants that are wearing fake nose and glasses.
I'd like to go to one of those parties some day.

Cottage gardens are densely planted, lots of species and colors thrown together.
Beautiful. Shabby chic, as it were.
She has lots of varieties from South Africa, where evidently there are so many species of wildflowers, they have yet to discover them all.

I didn't catch the quote verbatim, but to paraphrase, she said,
"The world is so Starbucked. So matchy-matchy. And you go into the garden, and it's so unaffected. And there are so many magical things."