Theology & flowers, an author interview
In which Christie Purifoy talks about her new book, *A Home in Bloom*
Gentle reader,
In honor of spring, I’m thrilled to bring you an interview with the delightful Christie Purifoy, who talked to me about her new book, A Home in Bloom: Four Enchanted Seasons with Flowers (due out April 11th, but you can preorder the book today). I love how Christie thinks theologically about the home and the most domestic, mundane parts of life. (Are flowers mundane? Surely not, but they are domestic!) After the interview, you’ll find an excerpt from the book.
BFJ: I love how the book’s cover puts the flowers in the kitchen sink, backlit by the light outside the window. How do you think about this image?
CP: I love the cover image so much, but it was a happy accident. I brought these flowers inside and dropped them into the sink thinking I’d arrange them later, but suddenly the light was so beautiful, I ran and grabbed my big camera. If I had realized this shot would end up on the cover of my book, I’m sure I would have taken the flowers out of the old Tupperware and found a pretty vessel. I would probably have fussed with them a bit, “arranging” them to seem natural. Instead, this photo perfectly captures what I mean when I talk about bringing our homes to life: so much of it is about slowing down long enough to simply notice the living, growing beauty that is everywhere in our God-soaked world.
BFJ: Why did you write A Home in Bloom?
CP: My personal soapbox sermon goes like this: gardening is not just a hobby! It’s a rich and rewarding way of life! I wrote this book to help others who are skeptical about gardening, those who tell me they don’t have “green thumbs.” I want them to understand how keeping a garden can be so much more than a list of chores—it can become one of the sustainable rhythms of a good and fruitful life in every season (not just spring!).
BFJ: Give us the short version: what’s the book about?
CP: This book is all about bringing our homes to life. It’s about re-enchanting the material reality of four walls and a roof.
Author photo courtesy of Christie Purifoy
BFJ: We don’t often associate theology with flowers, or even with home. Talk to me about that?
CP: Which is strange, right? I mean, the story Scripture tells begins in a garden and ends in a city/garden. Trees, plants, and flowers are everywhere in the story—even (especially?) the Holy Week story we are currently re-telling in our churches.
I believe that we were all made to live our lives in Eden, and this is not just a metaphor. When we choose to live lives entirely within the boundaries of human-made materials like asphalt and vinyl we are, in some real way, cutting ourselves off from a good creation that was always meant to be our home. I sometimes imagine the sadness God must feel for us when we refuse even to see the beauty of the natural world. We may be living east of Eden now, but through gardening—even very simple gardening like keeping some potted herbs on our kitchen counter—we are choosing to participate in the goodness of creation. After all, God is actively redeeming and restoring creation. He has not abandoned it. Why would we?
BFJ: Share a detail you’re fond of from the book?
CP: I’m a writer first and foremost, but it has been such a privilege to exercise my creativity in a whole new direction through the photography for these books. One of my favorite photos in the book is actually an old one taken with my cell phone. It’s a photo of my youngest daughter—she was only four at the time and had just come home after being briefly hospitalized for her asthma. She’s holding an enormous dahlia flower in front of her face. The flower is the exact size of her head, and that image of my own precious child looking like a beautiful flower touches something deep inside of me. Our lives may be as fleeting as the flowers of the field, but I look at that picture and understand for a moment how much God loves us and how precious we are to him.
“Dahlia girl,” photo courtesy of Christie Purifoy.
BFJ: What do people mistakenly assume when they hear about your book?
CP: I think they assume it’s a book for those who already garden or who want to garden. Books are a joy, in part, because they give us the opportunity to experience so many different things vicariously through stories. I hope this book gives every reader the chance to experience the goodness of a garden, even if they will never grow their own.
BFJ: How does the book relate to or come from your experience in ministry and discipleship?
CP: I’m a thinker, always stuck in my head, who was raised in an expression of Christianity that emphasizes ideas and the affirmation of belief statements and so on. Religion was a head-thing for me for so long, and I will always be grateful that gardening took me out of my head so that I could experience intimacy with God through my body. These dirt-stained fingernails are proof that Christian faith can be embodied in so many different ways.
BFJ: Are there difficulties in the spiritual life that A Home in Bloom can help to address?
CP: We rational, modern people love to place things in conceptual categories. Certain pursuits are obviously sacred, other pursuits obviously not. Growing up, my father was both a minister and a gardener, but I had no language for understanding his gardening as sacred work. I hope my books help give others the language I needed and have since found.
BFJ: If you could gift everyone with one insight from the book, what would it be?
CP: If you choose to take care of a garden, your garden will end up taking care of you. Or, perhaps it’s better expressed this way: take care of and participate in God’s created world, and God will have one more avenue through which to take care of you.
BFJ: How has your spiritual life and prayer life changed as you’ve matured?
CP: I’m a language lover and a poetry lover, so my prayer life has changed enormously over the years as I have embraced written prayers, mostly through The Book of Common Prayer. Written prayer feels like a gift from the church over the ages, and it’s a gift that I have gratefully received.
BFJ: What would your 10-year-old self say if she learned you’d grow up to write about this stuff?
CP: Oh my goodness, it’s wild to imagine. At that age, my absolute favorite book was The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett, so I imagine that my child self would have thought it all sounded too good to be true. Which it is. Praise God from whom all blessings flow.
BFJ: Besides A Home in Bloom, what are your top reading recommendations for folks who want to think more deeply about these matters?
CP: I highly recommend a recent book called The Well-Gardened Mind: The Restorative Power of Nature by British gardener, psychiatrist, and psychotherapist Sue Stuart-Smith. She also has a background in English literature, so this book is well-researched and beautifully written. Though not a religious book, her arguments about the restorative power of the natural world will convince anyone to get out there and touch some dirt. Or soil, as we gardeners call it. Her book offers the non-religious argument and evidence for my claim that we were made for Eden. We were made to live in gardens.
If the whole earth is a garden, then our homes are also gardens within a garden. Yet we are used to thinking of a garden as an accessory to a house. It is a bonus. An extra. It is “curb appeal.” But gardens are much more than backdrops. They are much more than pretty pictures. Gardens are where our food comes from. Gardens are where beauty grows. Gardens are shelter. Gardens are also sacred spaces for private prayer and community celebration. Gardens are where we walk with God and work our muscles. They are living works of art. What if you could live in a painting? What if you could live in a song? What if you entered a chapel or even a cathedral every time you went out to fetch the mail? A home in bloom is not a static thing, and it is not a barren place. It is constant change as seasons shift and children grow, and it is continuous return as the peonies bloom every spring and likely will for a hundred years to come. A home in bloom is hard work at times, but it is the most satisfying, productive kind of work when anxieties slip from our shoulders with the rhythm of our rake or as each seed falls from our fingers.
If you long for beauty in a world that rarely has time for such nonsense, then consider this permission to pursue nonsense. Truthfully, it is the most important and most serious kind of nonsense—it is the nonsense of fairy tales and poetry and flower gardens. Brought together, house and garden tell a better story than either one alone. And they can even help us to live a better story. It is a story in tune with the earth and with the music of the trees. It is a universal story yet highly personal and particular, never quite the same from one place to the next. I am tending an utterly unique story here at an old farmhouse in Pennsylvania, for these clods of clay soil, these red bricks, and these exact plants are found only here. And you, too, are invited to care for the particular ground beneath your feet in order to tell your own, entirely singular, home story.
Excerpted from A Home in Bloom: Four Enchanted Seasons with Flowers
© Christie Purifoy, 2023, all rights reserved
I’m so grateful to Christie for taking the time to share with us, and I know you’ll enjoy her beautiful book.
Buy Christie’s book here.
Grace & peace,
BFJ
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