“Mainly, to make my northern relatives jealous,” my friend Sue replied with a grin when asked what had prompted her to compile her list of the 60 species blooming in her garden on March 13, 2007. “They’ve got snow, and we’ve got things blooming!”…

I missed my chair. For six summers I sat in that Adirondack chair beneath the front yard’s silver maple to take notes on my garden, my notebook supported by its wide, flat arm. Hummingbirds whizzed past my head on a beeline to the Malvaviscus, while swallowtails danced among the phloxes and dangled from the ballooning joe-pye weed…