What started it all?

It's hard to say just when my beautiful obsession with gardening began. I dabbled in it for years during college, when I majored in Botany and assumed that that was enough to make me a reasonably successful gardener. It didn't take me long to find out there's a good deal more to it than that. Sure, it's helpful to know what xylem and phloem do, and just what it means to say Helianthus annuus--the common sunflower--is heliotropic. But that doesn't necessarily mean one knows diddly about what it takes to make something purchased in a pot thrive once it encounters the practical variables of soil character, water availability and microclimate. All the Latin nomenclature in the world wasn't going to get me far if I couldn't put the textbooks aside and quite literally get my hands dirty. Thankfully, this metropolitan-born girl was always a country girl at heart, enchanted by the beauty of creation even before I understood who its Creator was, and I adapted pretty rapidly. Gardening never had a chance to be just a hobby, really, it was almost immediately a passion. And twenty years later, that passion has never waned. Every year without fail, Spring bounds into my world again with its irresistible enthusiasm, transforming the straw-mat and gray landscape into one that is green and bursting with beauty, and I am once again hooked. It reminds me that I have a Wordsworth heart, and that life really can be distilled down to the wonder of a child at fields of golden daffodils, and dew drops clinging to the petals of a rose at sunrise.

There are still a few weeks left until it's safe for any new botanical babies to be deposited in our Colorado soil. I can almost see our weeping willow leaning ever so slightly, arms outstretched over the rose beds that surely have room for one more eager arrival. But wait we both must, though I doubt I will be able to resist fulfilling that desire myself for much longer, and may just visit a few nurseries this weekend in search of that firecracker-red rambler or Old Garden beauty whispering my name!