Elisabeth Grace Foley

Historical Fiction Author

Five Things I Learned In the Greenhouse

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If you’ve read this blog for a while you may remember that for a couple of recent years I worked at a local farm-and-garden-center. During that stint I wrote a blog post on a handful of humorous and thoughtful reflections sparked by the autumn end of the business. As spring comes on this year, and I make plans for my own garden, I’ve found myself reflecting on some things I noticed or learned during the spring seasons of that job.

– 1 –

I love flowers. I mean I really love flowers. I used to be under the impression that I just liked them moderately, but handling them and tending them every day just exploded a sheer sense of delight in the colors, the delicacy, the vibrancy, the shape and form and scent of leaves and blossoms, and a fascination with learning about the different varieties and how to grow them. I found a whole new creative outlet in choosing and arranging flowers for pots and window boxes. My favorite experiences were getting to put together some custom-ordered pots on my own, and helping people who would come in with a vague idea of what they wanted and say, “I’d like these colors, and about this height, and they need to be good with partial shade—what do you suggest?” This year my goal for my own flowers is to design some large deer-resistant pots in a particular color scheme, and as I make my lists of plants and plan how to arrange them in the pots, it’s pretty neat to realize how much knowledge I picked up on the job and how I can now put it to use as I need it.

– 2 –

There is no official limit to the number of times you can hit your head on the same hanging plant in one day. Yes, I know this from experience.

– 3 –

Pruning is not such a delicate task as I’d always thought. Before the greenhouses opened in the spring, we would trim back vining and creeping plants to keep them from sprawling too far out of their pots before opening day, and it amazed me how ruthlessly you can cut back plants like wave petunias, verbena, and even rosebushes in the early stages and then see them redouble and triple in size again. (It’s also, I must admit, easier to get comfortable with pruning when doing it on a large scale, and with someone else’s plants, instead of one small plant of your own where you’re nervous that one wrong snip will ruin it for the year!)

– 4 –

In sales, visibility is king. As an entrepreneur who has to grapple with marketing for my own books, this was interesting to notice. In a greenhouse with four rows of tables running lengthwise (meaning three aisles for customers to walk), the plants on the two middle tables (on either side of the main aisle) always seemed to sell fastest. Of course, it helped that many of the most popular flowers, like petunias, impatiens, and begonias, were originally on display there—but as the season went on and space opened up on those middle tables, other things were shifted into that space, and often a plant that had hardly sold at all suddenly started going like hotcakes once it was in that more visible position. Similarly, when a few plants of a type that didn’t sell very much were brought outside and displayed where customers’ eyes fell on them as they arrived, you’d often see an increase in people buying them. You can’t sell something if people don’t know it exists—and not everyone is there to go hunting in every corner.

The implications for indie book sales are interesting. It’s true, the internet gives us the ability to sell a product to a customer anywhere in the world, but in actual fact, there are far fewer book buyers who go hunting for just the perfect book than there are book buyers who buy because a book is in an easily visible position—e.g. on a bestseller list, a deal-of-the-day promotion, et cetera—caught their eye, like a dahlia or a geranium displayed right at the entrance to the greenhouse. It’s an interesting subject to ponder for entrepreneurs selling through a middleman, where we aren’t the ones in charge of which flowers get placed on the middle tables, so to speak. How can we best seek situations where we are?

– 5 –

The American home gardening industry is largely based on consumerism and disposability.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I think it’s a great thing for people to enjoy planting flowers around their home, and I wouldn’t dream of discouraging it. But think about it for a minute. The vast majority of flowers bought at garden centers are annuals, which at the end of every season are pulled out and thrown away—meaning avid gardeners are spending hundreds and even thousands a year on new flowers. What’s more, all these plants are started in plastic trays and transplanted into plastic pots—thousands and thousands of plastic containers which will ultimately end up thrown away. Even though smaller businesses re-use containers to save expenses, sooner or later they end up brittle and broken and on their way to a landfill. I’m not suggesting we forswear annual plants, but when you compare the overwhelming disposability of American gardening in general with, say, a traditional English garden where perennials and shrubs form the backbone and annuals are finishing touches—it’s worth considering the ultimate costs.

From the Archives: Emily’s Journey

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This is a revised and expanded version of a blog post from ten years ago.

As you might expect from my name, I’m considerably Irish in ancestry. More than half Irish, in fact, when you add it all up, but it doesn’t all come from the paternal side—as I’ve put together my family tree I’ve discovered a strain of Irish in practically every line. They’re often the hardest lines to trace, given the predominance of the same surnames and common given names being used over and over in Irish families! But at the same time, one of the few stories from my family history that has actually been passed down directly to me through the few intervening generations also comes from an Irish line—the story of one of my maternal great-grandmothers.

Her name was Emily, and she was born in 1891 in a brick row house in South Dublin, the third of four children and the second to live past infancy. Her father, the son of a farmer from Limerick, was a police constable; her mother was the daughter of a Tipperary groom; and her maternal grandmother lived with the family. I discovered for the first time when I located the family on the Irish census that Emily’s full name was actually Mary Emily, though she went by her middle name for most of her life, and by the end of it was using the “M” as a middle initial. (She had also trimmed a few years off her age by the end of her life, so that her tombstone gives her birth date as 1894!)

And in 1908, when she was seventeen years old, she and her fifteen-year-old brother Joseph set out across the Atlantic together, bound for America, to join their older brother John who had emigrated three years earlier. They sailed from Liverpool on the RMS Celtic, traveling second-class, and arrived at Ellis Island on November 14th, 1908, after an eight-day voyage. Their final destination was further up the Hudson in Troy, then a thriving industrial city of steel and textile mills, where John had settled with American-born cousins. Emily lived with a female cousin and worked as a stitcher in one of Troy’s famous collar shops, and in 1919, she married a first-generation American, the son of a German father and Irish mother, newly returned from serving in World War I. She would become the mother of eight children, five of whom would outlive her, and one of whom would be my grandfather.

Emily’s father never made it to the New World, but twelve years later, in 1920, her now widowed mother Margaret emigrated to join her children, her passage across the Atlantic paid by her eldest son. Possibly the onset of World War I in the same year her husband died prevented her traveling sooner.

(An interesting footnote that I only uncovered in recent years is that Emily’s grandmother Maria died in the infirmary of the South Dublin workhouse in 1913—though likely not because of poverty, since the record of her death lists her home address as with her son-in-law’s family. The likely reason was that Irish hospitals of this period would not take patients suffering from chronic illnesses, such as tuberculosis, and so those who could not afford other treatment were sent to a workhouse infirmary. Since chronic nephritis (a kidney disease) was listed as Maria’s cause of death, this explanation makes sense. Just three years later, the South Dublin workhouse was one of the buildings occupied by Irish rebels during the Easter Rising of 1916.)

I never knew my great-grandmother. I’ve only seen a few snapshots of her as a stout, white-haired elderly woman, and heard relatives speak of her who knew her in later years. But in a way, I think it almost makes it easier for me to picture her as that little Irish girl of more than a hundred years ago; to imagine the emotions and the untold stories of her journey. Five feet two, brown hair, blue eyes, able to read and write, ten dollars in her pocket…the passenger records fill in some of the details. I wonder what kind of a girl she was. What did she feel about leaving her homeland—was the thought of America exciting or intimidating to her? Was her younger brother (three inches taller) a companion she could lean on, or was she the leader of the two? What was the ocean voyage like for her? And how did she feel when she had her first glimpse of New York City from the deck of the Celtic?

Years of digging among genealogy records have filled in some more pieces to the story of their decision to emigrate. I found that eldest brother John had already tried his luck working abroad in England, and that one of their American cousins had visited Ireland shortly before John set out to join that same cousin’s family in Troy—probably at his encouragement. But the more personal aspects of the story still can only be conjectured. What kind of family discussions were held, what letters exchanged across the sea…what made their parents decide to send Emily and Joseph on alone? Those stories I may never know…stories that will have to live only in my imagination, stirred and prompted, perhaps, by the accounts of thousands of other families who lived the same story of crossing the ocean to a new life. But still it brings my knowledge of history closer and makes it more real, more lifelike, to know that someone connected with me walked the streets, saw the sights, and lived their life in an era that I research and read about and write about today…because it’s my history, too.

Some Writing Updates

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I realized this week that it’s been a long time since I’ve actually posted something about what I’m writing. It’s partly because I’ve become slightly allergic to talking very much about a project while it’s in progress. Talking about it too much can actually stunt my progress: the moment I tell somebody what I’m doing, I feel like I’ve set some mental standard or expectation that it needs to live up to, which piles on the pressure. I’ve probably taken being close-mouthed to the opposite extreme somewhat, and I don’t want to make a superstition or a self-fulfilling prophecy out of it (hence this post), but in general, keeping relatively quiet about works-in-progress does work better for me.

Anyway. I never feel like I’ve accomplished very much in a year (or almost eight months, in this case) unless I complete a major project; but when I look back at what I’ve actually done in 2022 and put all the little pieces together into a list it’s a pretty decent amount of work. Since January, I’ve…

• Revised and published The American Pony!

• Finished the first draft and first edits on my children’s historical fantasy The Summer Country. If you’ve been reading my blog for a while you may remember that title, and may have wondered what happened to it. Truth be told, I unpublished most of my posts about unfinished or badly stalled projects a while ago, for various reasons. However, I did finish this one and am quite happy with it. I do not know exactly what route to publication I’ll be taking with it yet, and it needs a few revisions, so I’ve laid it aside for a little rest before progressing any further.

• Added a few…a very few…pages to the first draft of my Ruritanian novel (which now has a working title: The City of the Great King); and continue to add to my notes/outline for it. This is basically a secondary project at the moment: not completely active, but not abandoned.

• Begun working again on the first draft of my next Western mystery, Last Ride at the Lazy G. I’ve been rewriting the opening chapters I drafted last year to get myself back into the swing of the story, and plan to stick with this as my primary project until I get that first draft done.

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In other news, my summer reading list for this year has been knocking it out of the park (five stars apiece for Founding Gardeners by Andrea Wulf, The Country of the Pointed Firs by Sarah Orne Jewett, Heroes Without Glory by Jack Schaefer, and a spur-of-the-moment read that wasn’t on my list, Adorning the Dark by Andrew Peterson), and I’m looking forward to starting my seasonal farm job again soon and doing an author table at an upcoming library event!