There was a massive rack of summer dreams on sale at the Peavey Mart. I picked up seedpacks of wildflowers, cosmos, and morning glories as well as some basic garden veggies. I must yet buy bachelor buttons and sweetpeas and white nicotiana at the very least.

February seems a bit early to start preparing one’s mind for gardening, but it isn’t. Every year around this time I’ve filled trays with soil and planted my saved fall seed, watered and kept it moist but not too moist, run up and down the stairs to turn the growlight off and on, and started about 200 seedlings for spring planting.

This year, none of that. I am throwing in some seed somewhere and buying some bedding plants, and have to decide where to stick them in the ground. I want a low-maintenance growing season so will try to keep my flower planting to a minimum. Trouble is, there are so many flowers I am not willing to do without. The sweet scent of sweetpeas on the vine, the night-scented aroma of nicotiana ... the feathery needled fernery of the shocking pink cosmos in abundance...the elegance of rainbow lupins and the raindrop so delicatedly nestled in the centre of its starry leaf. So much beauty, and fairly easily had.

I want to plant flowers at the gravesites of some of my relatives, now that I am here to tend them. Grandpa and Grandma J, Grandpa B, Uncle Bob, Grandpa Jack and ancestors I never met but feel a connection to anyway.