The Purple Season: A Spring Tablescape

In the spring a livelier iris changes on the burnished dove;
In the spring a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love.                  

             -- Lord Alfred Tennyson (1809–1892), Locksley Hall. Line 19.

 My mother's favorite color is purple.

As a twenty-something bride, she selected violet-sprigged china. Now, at eighty-four, she wears purple sweaters, shoes, and jewelry--even her reading glasses are pale purple.

I'll bet you can guess her most-loved flower.

She was thrilled when we drove up to Rattlebridge and were greeted by the Tennessee state flower,

the purple iris. I've always stayed indoors to write and cook; but I've inherited a garden, a real garden,
and I've got a lot to learn. In the past, we've had lawns and shrubs, but never a garden.
I'm looking forward to digging in the dirt and planting purple flowers and dreaming purple dreams.

My mother offered this advice:
The Gardener's Rule of thumb. "Weed'em and Reap.”

I was in a purple frame of mind when I set the table for lunch this weekend.

“To have complete satisfaction from flowers you must have time to spend with them. There must be rapport. I talk to them and they talk to me.”

            -- The Late Princess Grace of Monaco

Me, I talk to dishes. Yep, I do.

That's why I'm thrilled to be dishing at Cuisine Kathleen's every Wednesday night for her new linky party, "Let's Dish!"

I have long dialogues with napkins and napkin rings.

I talk, and they listen.

Dishes are very, very good listeners.

If you break one, they're, like, "Oopsy-daisy, get the glue pot, girlie!"

I have a feeling that flowers are the same way--quiet and kind and forgiving.

I do not talk to food, but I mutter to myself when I cook. For this spring lunch, I made a tomato-cucumber salad with a garlic vinaigrette.

The printable recipe can be found HERE.

The dishes have itty purple and green flowers.

They're part of Pfaltzgraff's Circle of Kindness--the Dunwalsh collection.
It's based on the book Circle of Kindness,

written by Jana Kolpen and Mary Tiegreen.

After the table was set, we enjoyed the afternoon--birds chirped and the ewes called to their lambs.

I tried to capture the sounds with my iPhone camera. 
It's real faint--you might need to turn up the volume to hear the sheep.

 “It is only when you start to garden--probably after fifty--
that you realize something important happens every day.”
                                              -- Geoffrey B. Charlesworth

“I believe that gardens themselves are very healing.

To be surrounded by the exquisite beauty of nature is to experience a healing of the soul.”

                          -- Author unknown

I'm delighted to participate in Let's Dish at Cuisine Kathleen

and Tablescape Thursday at Between Naps on the Porch.

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