In early March, Louise Wrinkle’s Birmingham, Alabama, garden is already colorful with pink and white flowering quinces (Chaenomeles speciosa varieties), double pink Camellia japonica ‘Debutante’, and the white-edged dark green leaves of fragrant Daphne odorata ‘Variegata’ .

 

I’m sure you’ve heard at least one gardener lament: “If only you could have been here yesterday!” I know from experience that many things only last a day. The fleeting bloom of a daylily is a good example—here today and gone tomorrow. But rather than a particular flower, it’s those perfect, ephemeral moments of just being in the garden that I most miss when they go by.

I don’t want to freeze these occasions. I want instead to be truly present, and all too often, I am not. Traveling away from the garden makes being there all the more precious. (I’m writing this in winter, when thankfully, the memory of noxious weeds has faded, and I’ve recovered enough from the tough tasks to be thinking again of plants and next year’s garden. In a month, I’ll be champing at the bit to get back out there.)

There will be a day in early spring when the breeze blowing across my face feels warm for the first time. There will be the summer days when combinations, planned for years, finally click and come together. There will be the crescendo of autumn colors. And yes, there will also be the first snowfall with flakes as big as postage stamps or as fine as dust, coating the earth and turning the messy tangle of faded perennials angel white.

Author Allen Lacy wrote in his 1992 book, The Gardener’s Eye, “Gardeners, like everyone else, live second by second and minute by minute. What we see at one particular moment is then and there before us. But there is a second way of seeing. Seeing with the eye of memory, not the eye of our anatomy, calls up days and seasons past and years gone by.”

It’s funny to admit in a book like this with its feasts for the eyes, that all of my senses are delighted by the garden. The sensations that summon the dearest recollections are often smells. There are the sweet perfumes of summer roses and autumn aromas like the caramel and toast of the weeping katsura tree’s turning leaves (Cercidiphyllum japonicum ‘Pendula’). Perhaps the smell that conjures the strongest memories for me is the earth as it begins to thaw: The plants stir and come back to life in nature’s first season—spring.

Thankfully, Ellen’s scans capture something about these moments—forever.