I just yesterday came across the website of Nancy Ross Hugo, who is the author of Seeing Trees, a book I’ve been coveting. I knew the book’s photographer, Robert Llewellyn, is local, but didn’t know anything about Hugo.
Turns out, she lives in Howardsville, gardened and wrote in Richmond for several decades, and (with her husband) runs the delightfully named Flower Camp, which used to offer outdoor education and now functions as a retreat center. She’s an all-around expert on plants and flowers and being outside.
Best of all, she has a blog called Windowsill Arranging where she makes a new flower arrangement every day. It’s totally cool. The arrangements are casual, the writing is crisp, the photos are pretty. But the real reason I like it is that it’s a great example of a person paying daily attention to the environment. It helps to have a lens for one’s looking. In this case, the lens has to do with what’s blooming, or what has a nice shape–hellebore leaves, parsley stems, a lone daffodil on New Year’s Day (!).
To write a blog like this, one has to go outside and look every day. That’s rather rare, but it’s important.