In Honor of Spring!

I love flowers. Who doesn't? They're these perfect, beautiful, symbolic, fragrant things that just burst spontaneously from the ground. So here's a little post for my fellow floraphiles. My faves:

Tulips ~ The first year of our marriage, Jesse and I lived in a tiny basement under a shop. In the winter, it felt like a cave. A cave with 70s carpet and 2 rooms. But in the spring, hundreds of tulips popped up all around the yard, and we had them in the house for weeks. Then it was a sunny cave with tulips--a vast improvement.

Dapne ~ If you've ever smelled a daphne bush, you know what I mean. This flower means Spring. It's my favorite smell in the whole world, including chocolate cake, my mom's perfume, old books, fresh-cut grass, and my grandparents' garage.

Crocus ~ After long, long winters in Rexburg, these dear faces pop through the snow around the Taylor building, and sometimes you see little groups of people huddled around them, cheering them on.

Hydrangeas ~ These are my Oregon coast buddies. I can't wait to have them in my yard.

Oh Wisteria. ~ I have had a life-long love affair with Wisteria. My window faced the sideyard as a kid, with a view of the fence and the gravel. One spring, we got a wisteria plant and my parents put it in the sideyard. Love. If I had my way, my entire house would be covered in Wisteria. Don't care if it takes over everything else. Some things you just can't fight.

Stargazer lilies ~ I took a semester off one fall in undergrad and worked at a call center for one of those online florists. It was a terrible business, during a displaced time, and I used to look at these lillies during calls and imagine having my own house someday and keeping Stargazers in the kitchen.

Zinnias ~ I was not a spoiled child, except in one respect: we had a pool. My Dad, a landscape architect, designed our pool to look like a pond, with a sort of kidney bean shape, a black bottom, and planters. In the summer, these were filled with Zinnias in all the colors of a sunset.

Peonies ~ At Pike Street Market in Seattle, the stands just spill over with Peonies in the spring and early summer.

And so many more.