Susan Palmer's Exquisite Now

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  • Soft cuttings make new plants

    Soft cuttings make new plants

    My mother-in-law, Helen Cherry, had a special love of roses. The family farm where she was born and raised west of Salem, continues to be alive with her roses many years after her passing. And now we have one of her roses in our yard, too, thanks to the simple technique of soft stem cuttings.

    You take a cutting from the plant, a bit of new stem that’s still pliable and green and with a little TLC it will develop roots and become its own fine specimen.

    The rose in the top picture started life as a stem cutting from a rangy grower in Helen’s garden. I clipped it seven years ago, while she was still with us and sharing stories of life on a 100-acre dairy farm nestled along the Willamette River. Having one of her roses in our garden is a felt connection to the farm and to her.

    All it took to grow that rose was patience, a clear plastic take-out container with a lid, a bit of dampened soil, some rooting hormone and time. I punched a few holes in the plastic lid so the plant could breathe, set it on a window sill for a couple of months, and the roots formed. Another couple of months later, it was large enough to pot up, and a year after that it went into the ground. Now it’s well over six feet tall and wide. Life finds a way, doesn’t it?

    Every spring when the first pink sweetheart roses begin to bloom, I think of her, her great energy, her funny stories, her family photo albums that always evoked memories.

    The plant in the container is a gardenia I started in October 2024, Eighteen months later (this is the patient part), the gardenia start looks like this. It’s about ready to go outside.

    Photos by Susan Palmer

  • Thread painting birds: an osprey project

    Thread painting birds: an osprey project

    Thread art. Photo by Susan Palmer

    Watching osprey hunt and catch fish in the rivers and lakes around Eugene could be a full-time occupation. They soar, they hover, they dive. When they rise up out of the water with a fish in their talons, I catch my breath. The sheer power in their wing strokes as they get airborne is a stop-and-stare moment. That’s what amazing nature photographer Norman Goo captures in the photo above. The Eugene photographer’s bird pictures give such a sense of the lives and personalities of his subjects. I’m smitten with his work and when I see his latest images on Facebook, I stop scrolling and sit with the picture. Last year, with his permission, I used one of his kingfisher images as a guide for an embroidery project.

    In January I started a second project based on the osprey. It’s been a real challenge to finish. The technique — needle painting, also known as silk shading — is deceptively simple, just one stitch that’s known as the short and long stitch. I finished the osprey with fish this week. I learned so much doing it and feel like this project deserves to be done again employing what I learned the first time around. Will I? Maybe. But Norman Goo has recently captured some heart-stopping pictures of green herons, so …

    Top photo by Norman Goo

  • Gunnera’s right for the bog

    Photo by Susan Palmer

    It’s almost prehistoric. And by that I mean big. It loves sopping wet soil. We have some of that in our back yard.

    Beside the gunnera is Craig, who is 6 feet tall. The gunnera could have him for lunch, if it were a carnivore. Fortunately it’s not.

    We don’t do anything, just make sure it’s wet, wet, wet. Harder in August but worth it.