I was standing in line at Lacoste Garden Center, two meters from the persons in front, someone else, two meters behind me, and there beside a display of fertilizer, I wondered if this would be the way it was from now on. Then again, when I had walked in the store, pushing a cart whose handle had been conspicuously sanitized, I had felt a rush of emotion... I get these rushes of emotions now for any community feeling; I had it last when the Snowbirds flew by. At Lacoste, it was like relief: the flowers were there, packs upon packs of greenery and colour and some beacon of "this at least feels still the same".

I like puttering in the flower beds around our house. Newly married I would buy flowers and plants with such an impatient wish for an already-established and completely lucious garden landscape. Gardening encourages the imagination, because you plant things small and imagine the space they will fill when they are big and what impact it will have on the whole picture. You also get to contend with limits: not only the climate, but what grows and what doesn't in your yard. There's room for happy discoveries and endless fiddling and in a way, gardening is not that different from writing. Since I'm into our fifteenth summer here, perenials have become established, trees have spread, and I've got used to massed plantings of dependable annuals for colour and delight. Finding begonias and petunias and geraniums, a collection of herbs for the garden and lavendar close to the door for aromatherapeutic whiffs in passing, are all lilke renewing with old friends.

I've become so familiar with my choices and the way plants are laid out in the greenhouse, I sometimes question whether or not my happiness is warranted. My yard won't win an award for floral design, my seven-year-old prefers yards with professional hardscaping, and the paltry amounts I do spend are nothing compared to some. But pleasures don't have to be big to be legitimate.

Flowers are unselfconscious, blooming as they are designed to do.