We spent our last afternoon here at the Orchard Tea House in Grantchester.

I planted spring flowers today.

Pansies and petunias, cosmos and bluebells.

And like a vegetable garden (my dream someday to have both the time and the soil), they will only last through the summer. And that’s if I’m lucky and I can keep them watered through the dry California heat that has already begun.

Pink jasmine and marigolds, fit for the “full sun” of my deck.

They have to be replanted every year and they only last for the season they bloom. And I like it that way.

Brilliant, fragrant color for the now…the current, and then both the scents and the hues will fade. But by that time, I will be ready for autumn again and won’t mourn the passing of summer.

My girls got upset last winter when they saw the rose garden at school trimmed down to the nub. The gardeners, like they are supposed to, cut back all the bushes so they’d grow bigger and more beautiful in the spring, I told them. They would have to wait through the season of “no roses.”

And this morning, as we walked into school and past the rose bushes, a few had begun to bloom. Naomi stopped to smell them as we passed. There is always the promise of the bloom even when the bush looks so ugly with its grey-green prickly branches.

And so right now, both on my deck and at school, we are in the season of blooming. I won’t mourn the passing of time because I know that next spring will bring new plants and new blooms.