Restoring Fairhaven by Carolyn Miller: Welcome to the party!

Love hurts, or so the songs say, so who wants it?

Taking on her ailing father’s gardening business on Merriweather Island, Samantha Green only wants to escape her ex and to make her father proud.

But Sam gets more than she bargained for when Greener Gardens accepts the job of restoring the gardens of a reclusive writer, Max Fairhaven, whose historical novels about romance and unrequited love litter bookstore shelves and movie marquees all over the world.

Max much prefers the fictional world to the real, and the gardening girl’s interruptions means he’s driven from his writing cave far too often for his liking.

Welcome back to Merriweather Island for Restoring Fairhaven by Carolyn Miller. We’re thrilled you decided to stop by.

This week, we’re celebrating garden style in honor of Samantha Green, the heroine of this novel. We love Max too, even if he is a little curmudgeonly from time to time.

My favorite flower

I thought you (and Sam) might appreciate my little tale of my favorite flower.

We all have history. Stories we share with our children. Moments of joy we pass along to each other. Sometimes, even a physical object steeped in history.

That’s what I have for you.

What? How does my favorite flower have anything to do with this?

Let me show you.

I don’t know about you, but I love roses. Every color. I’ve been known to buy myself bouquets so I can take pictures like this. Yep, those are my photos.

This love developed when I was young, around five years old, when I would go out in the summer and the smell of Mom’s roses saturated the early morning air.

This rose in particular.

I don’t know the true name of this rose. It blooms once a year, on Mother’s Day. (Don’t ask me how it knows, but it’s never missed a Mother’s Day.) And the fragrance is unbelievable. Of all my roses, this is the only one with that old-fashioned, heady rose aroma. Especially in the early morning.

Now for the history of this rose as it connects to my family.

My grandmother started growing these roses when she married my grandpa, back in the 1940s.

When my mom married my dad, in 1972, Granny Delphia gave her daughter–my mom–a cutting from her rose. For twenty years, Mom grew those roses all around our house. They flourished, spreading and growing until they were so big I could crawl under them and peek at the sky through their petals.

We moved in 1990, and the roses came with us in the form of several small cuttings since the bushes themselves were too big to relocate.

They almost didn’t survive, and by this time, my grandparents had passed and the people who lived in their house dug up the roses. Same with the people who bought our old house.

We almost lost that bit of history, but Mom saved the roses, coaxing them to live in this new environment.

When I married in 2002, Mom gave me a cutting, and the roses have continued to flourish.

Sometimes, life throws a little frost their way, and I think they won’t pull through.

Then they end up blooming bigger and brighter than ever before.