'Just Around the Corner'

February, maybe March. The ground is still cold to the hand but not to the plant — the plant knows something the hand doesn’t, and it has already started. You go out early and you find the first pale green push of new growth, the first tender stem that didn’t exist yesterday, the first indication that the whole machine is winding up again. It is the most hopeful moment in the garden because it is not a promise but an arrival. Not coming. Here.

These early-season botanicals — still pale, still translucent-stemmed, still holding the freshness that mid-summer growth has forgotten — are pressed at the precise moment of their just-beginning, sealed in the lightest resin, kept forever in this state of imminent spring. The name is accurate. It always is. Something beautiful is always just around the corner if you have learned how to go looking.

For the one who always knows spring is coming before anyone else does.