In Which Connor And I Go To Watson's

The little guy had a couple of seizures this morning at school, but he perked up after his quiet time so I decided it was time to go out.

It's the part of the year where I'm tired of the weather being so gloomy and, except for the heather and primroses, everything being so uniformly green, green, green (we don't do brown here because in the winter time everything is covered in moss) so I badly want to start gardening.  Of course it's too early for the gardening season to have really started up here, but that doesn't stop me from planning.  I knew I needed to see a little more color soon or I was going to go nuts, so I loaded Connor up and headed off to Watson's. 

Watson's is this gigantic glass and steel greenhouse palace set off in the farmland surrounding my town, and it's basically a nursery and home decor store and tea shop all rolled into one.  Getting there is a pleasant drive down Pioneer past all the little houses from the early 1900s-- including the dilapidated-but-still-gorgeous Victorian with all the gingerbread that sports a ten foot tall statue of an anatomically correct heart on a stake in the front yard.  Keep on going and you'll pass the place that I secretly want to buy even though we're happily settled (and also since it's two story would be completely impractical for us and would be way out of our price range anyway): the colonial-style farmhouse with the long apple-tree lined promenade. Once you get out of town, you hook a right where the road splits, pass the salmon hatchery, the hazelnut farm and the pink house, and right after the yard with the giant dead tree covered in wind socks you'll see what looks like a mile of glass roof winking just down the hill.  That's Watson's.

Watson's is pricey, but it's great to walk around and window shop in.  The only thing it's missing is a book store, and I think if it had one of those I would probably just appropriate one of their larger flower pots and move right in.  This is the time of year they bring out their brightest glazed pots, gazing balls and garden statues, and they look so fantastic after three solid months of nothing but green that I just want to buy them all and take them home, even thought they'd look absolutely ridiculous in my garden, which is not a fuchsia-colored-gazing-ball sort of place.

So Connor and I wandered around for an hour or so, reveling in the color and enjoying ourselves.  I ended up walking out with about twenty lily-of-the-valley bulbs, even though it's not really the season to plant them.  Lily-of-the-valley will live through anything.  Also they spread like gangbusters, so they'll be going in a contained section of my shade garden off the wheelchair ramp. 

I also bought a pack of trillium because I couldn't resist-- I absolutely love them.  I'd never heard of trillium before I moved up here as they didn't grow well in the relatively dry area of Texas I grew up in.  I went for a walk through a marshy area in the spring the first year we were here, stumbled upon a huge clump of them blooming like white stars under a grove of sitka spruce and was utterly enchanted.  It's probably not the right time of year to plant them either, but I don't care. 

I garden by the "whatever survives stays" method, and hey, it's worth a shot.

~Jess