My back acreage is filled with thousands of yellow Black Eyed Susans. The view from the porch is like a carpet of yellow for deer and fawns to play and lie upon. Earlier, it had been a sea of some sort of white flower and we all are wondering here in Turkey Hollow if there is a "third act" to follow the yellow. Maybe some sort of red? Flowers have always had a special place in my life mostly because of my Grandpa Grove (a.k.a. old Buzzard Bait).  

Never minding that we were surrounded by fields containing crops of tomatoes, asparagus, corn, peas, potatoes and beets, Grandpa had to plant a garden. So what did he plant? Tomatoes, asparagus, corn, peas, potatoes and beets! He added a strawberry patch and a pumpkin patch for variety, and it all took a great deal of effort to keep it in good shape all summer.

But to me, what made the garden worthwhile was that he also grew row after row of beautiful flowers from Gladiolas to Zinnias to Marigolds. The rainbow of colors was just vivid and beautiful. We would walk into the garden each day and cut fresh flowers for the house and even neighbors would stop by in their pickup trucks to admire his beauties. Hard red-faced farmers in their dusty bib overalls would suddenly become flower children as Buzzard Bait offered them fresh-cut flowers to take home to their wives. Aunt Millie's vegetable stand along Route 40 sold them to the rich folks from Philly passing by on their way to the Jersey beaches. The garden became a place of pride for the entire family.

When I think of flowers in childhood for some reason I always think of funerals. Dying meant two things back home: incredible food and beautiful flowers. The neighbors would fill table after table with their best dishes, cakes and pies - enough to feed the Russian Army. The wake (or viewing as we used to call it) was the first time we would see the flowers that people sent in memory of the deceased. After viewing the newly departed and remarking what a good job the funeral director had done with making the body up, there was not a whole lot to do except every once in a while prying some hysterical person from the casket. So to pass time, we would look at the huge baskets of flowers and see who sent them. With biting wit and maybe a tinge of bitchiness, we would comment on each bouquet and judge if the mourner had spent enough. Some were so tasteless in their intent that it would send tongues wagging. A farmer's wife spying a spray from the decease's mistress would give a shocked look, sniff in the air and loudly proclaim that the flowers should have been red to match the harlot's values!

In the sixties during the anti-Vietnam war protests, flowers became a weapon for the peace movement. As national guard troops were called out to quell campus unrest or the federal troops sent into Chicago in 1968 for the Democratic Convention, the flower children would go down the line of guns with bayonets and gently place a single flower in the barrel of each gun. We placed them in our hair and predictably sang the anti-war song, "Where Have All The Flowers Gone?"

And now all these years later, as the sun slips below the horizon here in Turkey Hollow, the wild flowers are so life affirming and just simply beautiful: Another quiet dusk with birds chirping, frogs crocking and deer snorting. The fawns bounce around in the flowers and seem to get a high off them. Their parents lay in them and bemused, watch over their gamboling youngsters. I like it.

Photographs taken in Turkey Hollow by Steven Guy