Welcome to Hope & Wildflowers (formerly Brewing Wisdom) my name is Steph,

This blog aims to bring inspiration, cultivate hope, and spread encouragement from a simple garden in an old town.

For a bit of backstory, gardening has always had a special place in my life. My grandparents helped my father raise my sister and me while he worked long hours to make a living as a construction boss and carpenter. When school was out, chances are you would find her and me outside running around in one of the gardens. I was always drawn to the beautiful flowers in my grandparent’s yard and garden.

One of the biggest inspirations behind Hope and Wildflowers took place over the past few years, after the unexpected loss of both my mother and father. When I first started a garden in 2016, it was to grow vegetables to preserve and have fresh,  homegrown food from the garden to the table. I had no idea years later the garden would become such a place of comfort. In 2015 our neighbor so kindly helped us break ground for our garden after we bought our home. It looks much different now as this was not an overnight project. There were as many victories as there were failures but each one presented lessons and wisdom along the way. Below is a slide show from breaking the ground in 2015 to our first harvest in 2016. 

“Change will come as surely as the seasons and twice as quick, we make our peace with it as best as we can (Little Women, 1997).” With the constantly changing seasons, life has a way of doing the same thing to us and we have to make peace with it the best we can. In 2019, my mother passed away unexpectedly. I was planting herbs in my herb barrel that morning when my father called me. That morning’s wind comforted me as I was standing in the field in complete shock. Nothing made sense, and this loss dug up a lot of painful memories. During a few months of counseling, I could not feel much emotion and dark thoughts crept in. I felt alone and without hope. After overcoming my battle with depression once before, I kept going even when it hurt.

I began to pray to find some beauty and hope in the ugly unjust. I kept busy by working hours in the garden. During that time our garden had really started to grow and bring in all sorts of little critters.  I started to look and observe plants and flowers more closely, and the more I looked, the more details I could see and the tiniest of creatures that without a camera lens would have been difficult to catch with the naked eye. This “breadcrumbed” into getting back into photography and researching names of the unique insects and wildflowers found in and around our garden. This opened the door to the importance of pollinators and the role they play for us.We feed them so they can feed us. We improved the habitats, added beneficial flowers, and plants that would benefit these hardworking pollinators. For the next few years, I decided to focus more on learning about flowers while deciding to go back to college to finish a goal I had wanted to complete for some time. While I was able to complete this goal, little did I know that even that would soon change.

When the pandemic hit in 2020, I had no idea what nightmares would lay ahead for many of us in the world. During those months when the country was locked down, the news was overwhelming, and social media was saturated with heartache and fear. The garden became more and more a place of solitude to calm my thoughts. During this time, many people began to grow gardens to find peace, and with the possibility of food shortages after, people started to hoard items such as toilet paper off the shelves. Shelves in some stores were completely bare. 

Then on October 4, 2021, I received a call from my grandmother. She called to tell us that she, my sister, and my father tested positive for Covid. Over the weeks, my grandmother and sister improved. However, my father only became more ill until the thief COVID-19 took his life on October 27, 2021. 

One of the last songs I shared with my father was Kari Jobe’s ‘The Garden,’ and my father loved the line “bringing peace to every corner of my mind.” I never knew how true those words would become as I spent many weeks watching the garden switch between seasons, from beautiful blooms to still frosted covered petals.

It was the morning of my father’s funeral, and the weather report said a frost was going to hit that week. I prayed and hoped for the frost to hold off to pick some flowers for my father’s grave from the garden. Thankfully, it did hold off. It was the only thing that got me out of bed that morning. If it was not for that sunny cold morning in the garden, I do not think I could have made it to his funeral. Those flowers gave me the purpose to get up and go through the pain. 

It was not until after I started to transition Brewing Wisdom into Hope & Wildflowers that I remembered a napkin my dad wrote on. One day back in 2009 after a rough day, dad wrote this quote and slid the napkin over to me to read while we were sitting at a table with some folks talking. I read it, and I thought the words were so profound I honestly was surprised by how much it resonated with what I was feeling. He smiled with the sideways grin he had and reached to throw it away. I told him I wanted to keep it. I am so glad I did. I found that napkin recently while something told me to find it again in my hope chest. The words on that napkin hit more today than they did as that 18-year-old who thought she had the world figured out.

There have been some days where it physically hurt to get up to take a shower. I cried each step to the bathroom and during the entire shower because I could not believe what had happened, and my body was telling me not to give up when everything in me wanted to end it all. Routines like simply brushing your teeth and doing laundry took me forever, whereas those tasks used to take only a few minutes in my day. I was told to read the Bible and get back into the church when the fact of the matter was I could not even bring myself to read, let alone get dolled up for church for people to stare and ask questions. When your father is a pastor, it adds a layer of complexity to grief when so many only saw him as a Pastor but to me he was much more, he was my father. Transitioning the church business over to the new pastor, handling the estate, and with other life priorities this made for a complicated grief. 

What brought some peace during that dull winter month was not only the little kitten (Boots) we adopted but also looking at photos and videos of the garden from the year before with the little critters it brought. During this time I also decided to join an incredible non-profit called the Growing Kindness Team.

At this juncture in my life, there seem to be transitions everywhere. This season of grief will pass. The blog here is transitioning from Brewing Wisdom’s focus on Coffee to the new focus on Gardening, photography, pollinator life including bee keeping which will be discussed by Jason. 

I hope this blog is a place of encouragement and inspiration to anyone who stops by. No matter what battle you are facing or the impossible task ahead of you, I encourage you to keep going and keep growing. 

Steph