44 animal, vegetable, miraclecided it was safe to carry out some of the seedlings we’d started indoors
on homemade shelves under fluorescent bulbs. The idea of eating from
our home ground for a year had moved us to start a grocery store from
seed. We’d been tucking tomatoes into seed flats since January, proceed-
ing on to the leafy greens and broccoli, the eggplants, peppers, okra, and
some seed catalog mysteries we just had to try: rock melons, balloon fl ow-
ers! By mid- March our seed- starting shelves were overwhelmed.
Then began the lover’s game we play with that irresistible rascal part-
ner, March weather. He lulls us into trust one day with smiles and sun-
shine and daytime highs in the sixties, only to smack us down that very
night with a hard freeze. On our farm we have a small unheated green-
house that serves as a halfway house, a battered- seedling shelter if you
will, where the little greenlings can enjoy the sun but are buffered from
cold nights by five degrees or so. Usually that’s enough of a safety margin.
But then will come a drear night when the radio intones, Lows tonight in
the teens, and we run to carry everything back inside, dashing in the back
door, setting flats all over the table and counters until our kitchen looks
like the gullet and tonsils of a Chia Pet whale.
This is what’s cruel about springtime: no matter how it treats you, you
can’t stop loving it. If the calendar says it’s the first day of spring, it is. Lily
and I had been lured up the garden path, literally, carrying fl ats of broc-
coli, spinach, and cilantro seedlings to the greenhouse on the bank just
uphill from the house.
The greatest rewards of living in an old farmhouse are the stories and
the gardens, if they’re still intact in any form. We are lucky enough to
have both. The banks all around us are crowded with fl owering shrubs
and hummocks of perennial bulbs that never fail to please and startle us,
like old friends leaping from behind the furniture to yell, “Surprise!”
These flowers are gifts from a previous century, a previous dweller here—
a tale, told in flowers, of one farm wife’s fondness for beauty and this
place. In a few more months we’d be drunk on the scent of Lizzie Webb’s
mock oranges and lilacs, but the show begins modestly in April with her
tiny Lenten roses, white- petaled snowdrops, and the wildish little daffo-
dils called jonquils that have naturalized all over the grassy slopes. As Lily
and I walked single file up the path to the greenhouse, I noticed these