Inspirations for Everlasting

           Everlasting flowers are those that keep their color and shape for, well, a very long time, if properly dried.

I was inspired to write my book EVERLASTING by three wonderful men: my first agent, the elegant Julian Bach, who said to me, “Why don’t you write a book about a working woman in New York City?” And Mark Hagopian, who was the florist for the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Boston, and Harrie Wagtenveld, whose Nantucket flower shop Grass Roots was a little bit of heaven.

Everlasting is the story of Catherine Eliot, who takes over a New York flower shop and builds it into a great financial success. As the flap copy on the hardback Viking edition says, “It’s a story full of love, lust, ambition, and blackmail, about what is passed from generation to generation, and what is truly everlasting.”

I did such a lot of research for this book, and loved every minute of it. I rented an apartment on the upper west side of NYC for a week. Harrie put me in touch with a society florist, Rhon Logan, who showed me around New York’s flower district at five-thirty in the morning and told me about clients who paid him $500 a week to put fresh flower arrangements in every room of their apartment. And that was in 1989. (I didn’t, by the way, blackmail any one.)

Looking back at this book, I notice that this is the first book that has the presence of a strong grandmother. The grandmother, Kathryn, lives in a great old mansion on Long Island, where she has a fabulous garden much like the famous gardens in England.

I’ve always wanted to write a sequel to this book in which Catherine takes over her grandmother’s garden and home and begins making perfumes. Someday. . .

(ereader)