Hope Took Root In East Texas

 🌼  Mrs. Lee's Daffodil Garden:  Where Hope Took Root in East Texas.

This place is located only 45 minutes from our home!!!

This story blooms by the way of a boxcar!  Yes...a big Boxcar!!  Mrs. Lee's Daffodil Garden in Gladewater, Texas is much more than a field of flowers..   What I love about this story is that it is a living testimony of vision, grit, love and pure determination  that turned a families raw land into a place of beauty.  

The story begins with Mr. Lee and his wife, Helen.  When they married, they had very little and in fact..(according to local lore) he had only twenty five cent in his pocket when he proposed to Miss Helen.  

During the East Texas Oil Boom of the 1930's, Mr. Lee built success in the oil industry and he eventually was able to purchase land outside of Gladewater, Texas.  True success had finally come their way. But, after Mr. Lee passed away in 1954, the land became something even more remarkable. 

Mrs. Lee had a vision and as the years passed, she expanded it.  Acre by acre, she purchased adjoining land until the ranch grew to more than 1,000 acres.  She transformed the land into two beautiful lakes and she had them stocked with bass, perch, and catfish.  But, her true masterpiece came from a simple flower order.  

Mrs. Lee ordered a box of jonquils.  When this order came in, it was not a box of flowers....it was a BOXCAR full of bulbs from Holland.  

Can you Imagine??

With the help of workers, thousands upon thousands of jonquil bulbs were planted across the rolling landscape. 

And Now.....each spring, when these flowers rise across the hills, it looks like a sea of golden sunlight beaming across the land.  Now, decades later, these heirloom daffodils continue to bloom and this is what moves me about this story.... This is proof, that beauty planted with intention can outlive us.  

It is so sweet how this garden whispers some things a lot deeper than could be imagined.  

Hard beginnings....Heaven's abundance...and how grief can birth something glorious when we try. 

I would say that Hope still grows here and it brings smiles to thousands of people each Spring.  🌼

Happy First day of March!!  🍀

Shug...💛