Edmonds food writer and radio commentator Nancy Leson is the featured speaker during the Edmonds Floretum Garden Club’s Monday, Nov. 15 program, starting at 11 a.m. via Zoom. The meeting is open to the public. Email edmondsfloretum@hotmail.com to get the Zoom link.

Join Leson in her kitchen as she laughs (and cries) over the many ways in which she finds culinary inspiration. In her talk, ” Grow It. Make It. Share It. Food: A Celebration,” she tells stories about pulling carrots from her container garden, culling the blackberries that menace her quarter-century-old grapevines, and trading Northwest bounty — from sourdough to sour cherries, gravlox to Gravensteins — with her green-thumbed friends and neighbors.

Leson is an award-winning author, radio personality and public speaker who learned about food during her first career: waiting tables. Seattle readers know her from two decades as a restaurant critic and food columnist for The Seattle Times (her absurdly well-fed dogs appreciated all those doggie bags). Leson also teaches cooking classes at PCC and other culinary schools throughout the Seattle area.

These days, when she’s not chatting about recipes or interviewing makers and shakers in the food world for NPR member-station KNKX, Leson helps end hunger one loaf at a time as the Edmonds neighborhood coordinator for the Community Loaves project.

You can read more about Community Loaves here, more about Nancy Leson here and more about Floretum here. 

Floretum turns 100 years old in 2022. To celebrate, members planted 6,000 daffodil bulbs around Edmonds earlier this month. Watch for a spectacle of blooms in March and April.

A hundred years ago, instead of daffodils, it was roses. In 1922, Anna Bassett and a few friends started a rose society in Edmonds. She placed a notice in the Edmonds Tribune-Review asking only “true” rose lovers to attend a meeting. The attendees were so impressed by the speaker, a former superintendent of Seattle Parks, they immediately decided to expand the purpose of the society and even invited men to join. They named it “Floretum Society.”

Floretum began by holding flower shows, in the hope that Edmonds would become known as a “Floral City.” Their desire was to develop the city into a “Bower of Beauty.” One landscape engineer, Fred Cole, was so excited he offered his services for free. By the end of 1923, Floretum had city backing, citizen support, and a vision that would become a reality lasting for a century.