'Spring Bounty'

There is a week in spring — sometimes two, if the season is generous — when everything blooms at once, as if the land forgot to stagger its offerings and gave everything simultaneously in a single magnificent overpayment. Coral hyacinth in its dense spikes. Hydrangea opening. Elderflower in cream umbels. Artemisia holding the silver thread through everything. Smartweed arriving early, before anyone expected it. Lily of the valley nodding in its shaded corner. And at the center, the quince heart — that firecracker red, that defiant early bloom, the first fruit tree to insist on color when everything else is still deciding.

The tall rectangle holds all of it — a vertical garden, a season pressed flat and made permanent on a heavy chain that matches the weight of what spring offers when it is feeling generous.

For the one who never takes for granted the week when everything blooms at once.