Bank of Flowers

Pink is the new evergreen.

The non-flowering trees always take longer to turn green. But it doesn’t matter. Pink phlox cover the ground. Pink tulip trees fill the sky. And double pink peonies will soon fill the air with their heady perfume.

Ahhh. Spring.

Have you ever been on a jog-a-shop?

It is like a landscape shopping marathon but shorter and you can’t actually buy anything. You jog through whatever landscape you happen to be in and shop for ideas on what to do with your personal outdoor space or the one you plan to have one day.

You can run but only through uninspiring neighborhoods.

Otherwise you are likely to miss unassuming but potentially pertinent details. Like elegant fence caps or well-integrated birdhouses that don’t scream cute.

Stopping is occasionally essential.

Not to take a break (this is exercise, you know) but to take essential pictures of color and texture combinations for flowers whose names you don’t know and will need to somehow reference at the nursery later.

This is what I did on this first glorious 70-degree New England day.

As a side note, I’d like to add that for the first time I took our dog Floyd.

Apart from nearly losing my arm to a squirrel chase, he was an excellent shopping jog-a-shop companion.

Kept pace. Didn’t mind stopping. And apart from getting a little obsessed with a few telephone poles and fence posts, he was not easily sidetracked.

Can’t say that for all shopping buddies.

The kayak-a-shop is way more riveting.

BUT the weather needs to have been warmer longer.

AND the odds of the waterfront estate landscaping ideas working in your (my) backyard swamp are questionable, so it’s really more of an ooohing and ahhhing kind of excursion.

Flowers, for me, are the seasonal currency of wellbeing. The sense of relief that lets me exhale back into the sweet nature of things.