My wife is an avid gardener, so when the need for a gift arises, I often rely on seed companies and plant nurseries to answer her heart’s desires. That’s how I’ve ended up on email lists for retailers who cater to green thumbs. It’s made for a lively inbox as I reach for my smartphone each morning.
If not for these sales pitches for petunias and potting soil, for daisies, dahlias, and designer wheelbarrows, my menu of messages would tend toward the sensibly gray. Over breakfast, I scan the usual exchanges about work deadlines and group projects, the daily digital grist of every office mill. Thanks to various electronic newsletters from the major media outlets, I can also click through updates on Ukraine and Congress, crime and wildfires, inflation and the trade wars.
All of this might easily nudge me into a morning malaise. But thanks to the marketers of marigolds, trumpet vines, and hydrangeas, my once-bleak inbox now also blushes with cheerful pastels.
“Discover dahlias! Now 20 percent off!” I was urged in a recent email. “Poppy Power!” headlined another sales pitch. I rubbed sleep from my eyes the other day and learned of a “Tomato Tuesday!” promotion.
Exclamation points, I’ve discovered, wiggle through today’s gardening literature as plentifully as earthworms. There’s a tribal enthusiasm among those who putter in the soil – and those who market to them – that’s hard to match.
Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff/File
Even so, given the challenges of the planet these days, enthusiasm of any sort shouldn’t be casually dismissed. Which is why, even when I’m not in the market for some new botanical treasure for my spouse, I’ve found myself lingering over the sales pitches from her favorite suppliers.
I’m looking now at an ad for cosmos, which features flowers that look lifted from a painting by Monet. Not long ago, I opened my day with an offer for peonies, their blooms so vivid that they seemed like a hundred smiles. The other day, for no particular reason, I found myself lost in a photographic gallery of anemone blossoms, each one floating as grandly as the moon in an evening sky.
These exalting emails extend a pleasure I first developed years ago while thumbing through mail-order catalogs. The seed catalogs landed reliably in my porch mailbox each winter, just as the Christmas decorations had been put away and I was casting about for some compensating cheer. Invariably, a huge tomato graced the cover, assuring frost-weary householders with the promise of summer. Even when I wasn’t shopping for much, I’d keep at least one catalog on our coffee table, the marquee tomato looming like the sun near our couch as my wife and I sipped mugs of tea and thought of warmer times.
I still welcome the presence of those seed catalogs in my living room, where they invite me to turn each page and think of the year as an unfolding story. But the marketing emails from garden suppliers greet me so often that they’ve turned daydreaming into a daily discipline. While combing my messages and planning my day, I’ll sort through the customary urgencies that touch any life: reminders about bills, pleas for money from worthy causes, a call for volunteers from our neighborhood church.
Then a giant sunflower will blossom into my email directory, thanks to a wily plant nursery eager for a sale. Savoring an image that Van Gogh would envy, my mind begins to drift, like a hot-air balloon over a verdant valley, as I indulge a fantasy of fields flooded with flowers to the distant horizon.
In an anxious year, these garden ads have been a sustaining solace. I might even buy a few sunflowers for myself.
