'April'

April arrives before you have finished deciding whether you want it. The ground is still cold in places. The light is uncertain. And yet here are the smartweed seed pods, small and precise, insisting on their own beauty before anyone has asked them to. Lily of the valley comes with its bells and its particular smell — that smell that means spring has committed, finally, to showing up. Gold dust settles over everything the way late afternoon light does when you are not paying attention and then suddenly are. Artemisia tips hold the silvery gray that belongs to no other plant.

Together in the ornate scalloped oval of the Vienne collection, they make the case for April as a feeling: the particular mix of not-ready and already-here that arrives every year and is always, somehow, a surprise.

For the one who is always surprised by spring, and glad of it.