This morning, while I was setting up the vegetable/honey stand, a delivery van backed into the end of the driveway near my stand and the driver got out. Dressed in his black and purple uniform, I asked him, “What you got there, flowers?” “I don’t know,” he admitted as he turned the box over in his hands looking for a clue. “Tulips,” I said, “the tulips are here.” “Yes,” he said, “flowers.” “Just toss them on the front seat of the truck,” I requested, pointing to the open door of my blue pickup.

I am of the age now where I don’t remember in October what I ordered in March, so life is like a birthday party -- full of surprises. After my farmstand setup, I headed back into the woods, yellow now from the leaves and damp from the rain, with that unique fall smell, and the grey tree trunks darker and streaked from the night’s rain and leaves coating the forest floor like confetti for Artemis, Goddess of the Hunt. I took my Schrade pocketknife and slit open the package.

Ok, great, a couple hundred tulip bulbs directly from Holland and a double-bearded Iris. I don’t know what double-bearded means in terms of a flower, but I know I can only grow mine singularly. I will look it up. Iris, herself, was goddess of the rainbow. I must have been taken with the idea.

I have always had a connection to tulips, though, and as a kid I helped my mother plant them and dig them up in the fall. Her flower gardens were her main place of refuge from her life of work and family, and she was always quiet and calm in the garden. Tulips were part of a bigger design for her flower beds, but for me, I have come to wildly plant clumps of them here and there, scattered within the wilderness, or on the edge of buildings, or on the grass fringes of dirt lanes. Once I plant them, I am done with them and they usually fade away after a couple seasons, unlike the naturalizing daffodils which continue to proliferate across their locales.

Tulips, for me, act as a visual confirmation of spring when they bloom, and their reward is principally visual as they have limited fragrance. It’s all about sight. And to some degree there is a genetic link, as part of me is of Dutch ancestry, way too far back to know, but I have been to Holland many times and during the last trip saw the breeding ground in Leyden University of the first tulips brought to the Netherlands from Turkey. In 1975 I was browsing an antique shop outside Rotterdam and came across some beautiful thick Dutch tulip tiles which had been carefully pried off a kitchen or pantry wall somewhere, and I bought a handful to bring back to my mother. Subsequent research showed the oldest tile to be from around 1690, so I felt pretty good about that and thanked my grandmother and mother for my training in antiques, such as it is.

My business card has a tulip on it, and my honey label has a tulip on it, even though you will be hard pressed to find a honeybee on a tulip.

Time to clean off the garden shovel and plant some flowers. Spring is right on the other side of these dead leaves.

And remember tulips are better than one. Sorry.