JOY ALONG THE WAY: LANDSCAPE IN YOUR MIND WHILE ROBINS SING

Things are picking up at the garden centers. One of my favorite rites of spring is strolling through the aisles of trees and shrubs that are for sale. Surveying them, I do a lot of mental landscaping. This white flowering crabapple tree would look good where the old lightning-struck wild cherry reigned. The cherry stump is about gone, so maybe there wouldn't be much old root trouble in the planting. In time, its white April bouquet would rise up above the garage roof, beckoning me to come sit under it and observe the world from that angle. That Bradford pear there, placed 10 feet in front of the cables that anchor the ugly utility pole, would hide them in, maybe, two years. Look at the glistening green of that boxwood! It reflects multitudinous rays of sunshine. Why haven't I ever had any boxwood? I, who, unlike many others, can smell the faint fragrance of this evergreen shrub? Where shall I put a few of these hardy bushes?

By the time my stroll is finished, the scenery has imaginarily changed around my premises. The magazine, "Birds & Blooms," ought to have a picture of it for their cover.

Inside the centers, things are just as fascinating. Fancy birdhouses are big on the market now. They have delightful little platforms with porches and picket fences, fireplace chimneys, and one has a dormer window. Some day they may have a little mock air conditioner sitting alongside, or a miniature pile of fireplace logs.

Let's see, now, where could I place another bird house? Perhaps atop the big garden seat? The little garden seat? That fence post?

This, too, turns out to be an exercise in imagination. About the only birds around here, besides the martins, that want houses are wrens and I have six wren houses.

Finally I end up at the packaged seed counter. Such a rainbow of color. I have tried to imagine how many acres it would take if the contents of every seed package on the rack were planted, came up and thrived. The whole township? County? Nah!

With X-ray eyes I can see inside the paper packages. Here are the little white shriveled seeds of the nasturtium, the tiny round pellets of the radish, the dog-tick look of the castor bean, the little black sticks of the marigold, the seed-tick appearance of the Black Seeded Simpson lettuce. Are there many old gardeners who can pass a SIT (seed identification test)?

I come home, sans trees, shrubs, bird house, lawn ornament but with a curious satisfaction that I have been somewhere important. My purchases have been modest but exciting -- a package of Heavenly Blue Morning glory seeds and a package of castor bean seeds. I'm going to try something. I'll sow the castor bean seed first, then a little later, and quite close by, the morning glory, just to see if I can make the tall castor beans seem to bloom with blue morning glories!

Hush, I know castor beans are poison. I don't plan to eat them. Naturalist, Hal Borland, said spring is a time for laughter of sheer delight, amusement or absurdity. So, laugh!

REJOICE!

~Jean Bell Mosley is an author and longtime columnist for the Southeast Missourian.