Roses of my own, on carefully pruned canes standing in New England mulch. Rented roses on rose trees in Hollywood. I thought of sweet peas--fragrant rainbows along old fences. Of delphiniums--hybrids taller than my head, rockets frozen at the climax of blue burst. Lilies and phlox and poppies. I thought of annuals--of planting the grains, setting out the frail seedlings--and walking the later carpet--a hundred styles of color: zinnias and marigolds and asters, verbenas and lavender, sweet William and candytuft and pansies, nasturtiums, forget-me-nots and primroses. I thought of foxglove, too, and Canterbury bells. For a long time, of hollyhocks regimented against white clapboard--red, mauve, yellow, pink, purple, orange. Then I thought of sunflowers growing like Jack's beanstalk. Spring flowers and the years I'd spent changing a steep rise of field into a rock garden, plowing, bulldozing, wading in a cold brook to collect the great, flat stones, trucking them home, embedding them one by one in the slope--on aromatic rainy days, in the sweet spring sun, and in the hard dirt of October. A wall here, steps there, an outcrop yonder, and a place for a pool below. Then the little hill opened into memory's bloom of crocus and narcissus, daffodil, tulip, hyacinth and scilla, the creams and livid whites, pale yellows and money-gold hues, and the many blues of springtime, bright, pastel, lilac. The bells and stars and cups--and the spring scent that is the honeyed promise of summer coming. Next, I thought of the woodland flowers--flowers before men found them. The precious arbutus, inexhaustible spring beauties, violets, the anemones, the lady-slippers, bloodroot, showy orchis standing in a wet glade beside a moss-shawled log, and pitcher plants--red rubber flowers on the sphagnum belly of weird bog. All summer long the rues and cardinal flowers and gentians; ferns--goldenrod, when the clear air cooled--when night's sky throbbed with wings and carried to earth the enthusiastic, strange twitter of migration. I, too, migrated. I came to my other home in Florida--the crashing flowers, the trees bigger than houses and bright as a florist's potted plants: poinciana, bauhinia, spathodia, jacaranda. Extravagant vines--alamanda, yellow as these roses, trumpet flowers as orange as Mexico's sunsets, pandoreas, solandras, and the holy, nepenthic stephanotis. Jasmine. Glade hammocks with orchids blooming on stumps like swarms of sucking butterflies--great white wading birds watching and vultures pinned above in the blue, cloud-dappled sky. Brief glory of flower-upholstered deserts. Alpine flowers in the high, thin, whimpering air with near snow. And trees. Great God, the trees! It was, taken by itself, a many lifetimes. All good. All beautiful.