May Sarton has put into a few graceful sentences what I’ve been attempting to express with this project. This is what Slow Bloom is all about.

“It does not astonish or make us angry that it takes a whole year to bring into the house three great white peonies and two pale blue iris. It seems altogether right and appropriate that these glories are earned with long patience and faith … and also that it is altogether right and appropriate that they cannot last. Yet, in our human relations we are outraged when the supreme moments, the moments of flowering, must be waited for … and then cannot last. We reach a summit, and then have to go down again.
Maybe patience is the last thing we learn.”
~May Sarton; Journal of a Solitude

And thank you to Karyn Schwartz, proprietess of Sugarpill on Capitol Hill in Seattle, for bringing this to my attention.