Flower Shops Kinder LA

Kinder LA Press

Casselberry florist finds life in bloom after a withering start

Hong Kong and then eventually to New Jersey, where she was able to meet her father for the first time. But her American classmates were not any kinder than those back in China. “The whole school, I was the only Chinese girl,” she said. “Schools were very prejudiced at that time. I felt very lonely. Nobody talked to me.” Over 60 years later, Mimi can’t hold back the tears. Her dog, Butters pounces anxiously on her small frame, desperately attempting to comfort her. "She knows you're upset," her daughter Irene calls from the front of the shop. After getting married and giving birth to her son and daughter, Mimi and her family moved to Casselberry, where they opened Jimmy and Mimi's Tea Garden Restaurant in 1979. She started forming bonds with patrons and establishing her name in the community, Irene said. “People came here because my parents were part of the product,” she said. Then Jimmy was diagnosed with a kidney problem, requiring dialysis for 13 and a half years. Mimi ran the business in addition to taking care of her husband for as long as she could, mortgaging her house three times to pay his medical bills, but was eventually forced to sell the restaurant in a bad deal, which she says cost her everything. “I couldn’t take anymore. It seemed like the whole world came down on me and I don’t know what to do,” she said. It was during this time that Mimi said she considered taking her own life to end the suffering. But then she found hope in her community. “I went down to the church on Maitland Avenue called the First Baptist Church of Maitland. On Sunday, there is always somebody there. I told them, ‘I need somebody to help me. I want to live,’” Mimi said. The church sent a woman to talk to Mimi for the next three years, encouraging her to keep going, she said. She also started practicing tai chi during this time. “The philosophy [of tai chi] is, no matter how hard it is, it’s like a cement wall. If you look hard enough, there’s always a pinhole someplace,” she said. “If a pin can get through the cement wall, I can do it too.” With this newfound encouragement, Mimi picked up her bucket and grew the business to what it is today. “[I hope] I can help one person to not harm themselves ... to look forward and continue and just keep doing the good thing. Somehow you’re going to come out. Everything will be OK,” she said. For Mimi, flowers “have a healing power. It is magical,” she said. Mimi works in her shop seven days a week for at least eight hours a day. http://www.wpmobserver.com/news/2015/dec/23/casselberry-florist-finds-life-bloom-after-witheri/

Flowers: Most women aren't so delicate, Hillary

Monica Lewinsky was being called all sorts of horrific names a generation ago. As I recall, "fat" was one of the kinder ones. Christine M. Flowers (cflowers1961@gmail.com) is a lawyer and columnist for the Philadelphia Daily News. http://www.theledger.com/opinion/20161003/flowers-most-women-arent-so-delicate-hillary

California native with a rosy outlook

Melanie Cross and Jean Struthers take a break from splitting a nursery of tiny seedlings into a kinder garden of individual pots to peer at a gawky buckwheat plant. "Hairy knees!" they chortle together. Welcome to botanical humor. Rosy buckwheat, or Eriogonum grande rubescens, is one of the showiest of the 250 species of this native Californian, which can be found growing from the Channel Islands to among rugged inland chaparral. Eriogonum or literally "woolly knees," comes from the Greek for the first species named, referencing the hairy nodes of the stems. Check out the "Jepson Herbarium," an exhaustive guide of California's flora from the University of California, Berkeley, and further prepare for a vocabulary quiz show: The buckwheat stems are also known as the peduncle. The main stalk carries the inflorescence, or flower cluster. And then, the perianth, or flower, is generally white to red or yellow. The nonedible flowering buckwheat grows 1- to 2-feet tall in mounded clumps that can spread 2 to 3 feet across — a good anchor plant. The leaves are evergreen and are spoon-s... http://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/2016/01/06/california-native-with-a-rosy-outlook