Flower Power

Sometimes I need to see colours. I'm not daydreaming about spring, nor am I seeing the winter as dreary. But the winter months tend to be reserved, not given to flamboyant finery.

I needed to see some plants that showed off their colours—swaggered. So I visited a Garden Center and spent several hours roaming around taking photographs. No one asked why I was hunched over a plant or why I moved some plants to a better location. New Englanders mind their own business.

One woman wandered about looking at plants, stopped and said, "This is like a field trip." I told her about the small fish pond. "I don't like fish," she said. Because I didn't want to extend the conversation, I hesitated to ask her if she didn't like fish as pets or if she abhorred the thought of eating fish— and did that mean all fish.

A number of years ago I traveled to the west coast and visited Mt. Rainier. We hiked through an alpine field blanketed with wildflowers—magenta paintbrush, broadleaf lupines,heather, elephant head, yellow monkeyflower ...

~Iris Murdoch said " People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us."

And that's how I felt wandering through the greenhouses—mad with joy.