Wild for Flowers

Fabulous news here from Northern NJ! My most recent release It Happened One Night (came out last fall) is going to be published in Norway! It Happened One Night is my second book, so you can bet I'm thrilled to be able to say I'm (imagine Austin Powers voice here) international, baby! Ye-ah!

There's more good news too. With spring, the wildflowers have come back. And I'm looking forward to learning more about those so-easily-overlooked little treasures.

Despite its wintry cover, much of It Happened One Night is set during the spring and summer on a beautiful wildflower farm in Vermont. I had to do a lot of research about wildflowers in order to write it. Fertility and flowers tie into the story. One sister in the book wants a baby but the other wants to travel the world (you can guess which one gets pregnant unexpectedly).

I love Vermont. The picture here is at a little mountain lake that my fiance and I stumbled across. A great place to write a poem and hunt for flowers!

Each chapter begins with a little factoid about wildflowers. For example:

Dandelion: Taking its name from the French dent de lion (tooth of the lion), the dandelion is a survivor that can withstand even the worst treatment from fickle springtime weather. Folklore says that if a maiden attempted to blow the seeds off the dandelion, the number of seeds that remained foretold the number of children she would have.

Or

Sunflowers are loved as much for their many uses as for their beauty. The stalk of the sunflower is one of the strongest and yet lightest natural substances in the world. The sunflower is also a willful seedling: In the early 20th century, naturalist John Burroughs reported having seen a sunflower pushing up through the pavement “like a man’s fist.”

Learning about wildflowers really changed the way I write. When I started noticing flowers, I started appreciating the outrageous beauty that fills every single day in overlooked ways. Flowers made me pay attention--heightening my powers of observation and my attention to real life details. You might even say flowers made me a better writer.

If you're interested in flower folklore--and a story of romance and motherhood--I hope you'll put It Happened One Night on your list!

In the meantime, here's a tip!

Very soon, the REAL wildflower farm that helped inspire It Happened One Night is going to be giving away a Garden Lover's Gift Basket on my website. It's worth over $100.

There are two ways you can get involved in the competition.

1. Subscribe to my blog (and leave a comment while you're there to enter to win a free book!): www.lisadalebooks.com/blog. Emails go out about once a week.

2. Subscribe to my mailing list. Emails go out only a few times a year when I host contests. www.lisadalebooks.com.

Happy spring and much, much happy reading to you!

Lisa Dale