May in the Garden

Sometimes I’ll spot a flower blooming in the garden and my eyes well up. Not quite tears, but that swell of emotion that comes from waiting for something — sort of forgetting about it, but not really. Some of my plants keep me waiting three years or more. That whole thing about “first year sleeps, second year creeps, third year leaps”? With some peonies, iris, and others, third year just peeps one eye open and considers flowering.

This is my first garden — that usually makes people laugh. But what can I say? I don’t do anything small.

I started gardening in earnest five years ago as a way to survive the pandemic — mentally, emotionally, financially. My wedding work paused overnight, and I couldn’t afford to buy wholesale flowers. So I began planting anything I could cut. But the garden quickly became more than that. More than survival.

At first, I didn’t even know what I was growing. One of the first peonies I planted in 2018 — a pink one — turned out to be a tree peony, something you’ll never find at the flower market. Two years of obsessive image searches and peony forums later, I figured out its name: Hana Kisoi. That discovery opened a door to an entirely new way of seeing flowers — through time, through rarity, through community.

Now, the collection is curated — not for resale, but for story, color, and surprise. My gardens are planted in palettes that unfold in succession over the seasons. In May, my beloved peonies bloom alongside bearded iris (too fragile to ship) and roses (never the florists’ kind — always the strange ones, the watercolored, the sprawling). My garden gives me magical moments that simply don’t exist in the floral markets.

It’s not a design philosophy I’ve been able to fully explain before. But I’ve built something that offers something to cut nearly every day from March through December. Still, May is unmatched — the confluence of tulips, the first roses, and every kind of peony blooming within days of one another. It’s breathtaking. It’s overwhelming.

It’s fleeting, too. But the magic is that it comes back — altered slightly, surprising again.