When I was in college back in the Dark Ages before Ravelry and blogs, when knitting needles were mostly metal or plastic and yarn choices were woefully limited, I had a friend named Harriet who made a sweetly big deal out of May 1st.
She’d tiptoe out of her dorm room at four in the morning with a pair of sharp scissors in her back pack and a basket handle over the crook of her arm. Dressed all in black and padding quietly out of the quad in her sneakers, she’d slink over to the residential neighborhoods that flanked our campus in order to steal liberate armfuls of flowers from the pristine spring gardens that decorated the grounds of those homes. She was never greedy, though – her next stop was a roadside meadow not too far from campus where she could supplement her cultivated treasures with wildflowers that were never part of anybody’s garden scheme, but just as colorful and fragrant.
Back in her dorm room an hour later, she’d fill small glass jars with these unique bouquets, wrap a wire handle around the lip of each jar, and – still before sunrise – quietly hang her May Day floral arrangements over the doorknobs of her friends’ dorm rooms. These utterly charming nosegays were what we’d find when we first opened our doors to greet the day. And I’ve never forgotten them, even years later.
In the spirit of May Day, thought I’d share a few more beauties from my garden. It’s really outdone itself this year.
That is so sweet. I had totally forgotten we used to do flowers on the door on May Day when I was a child, knocking and then running away.
Beautiful flowers and lovely story; it really made me smile!