How do I love the flowers? Let me count the colors.

They came in such a bright array of colors and had interesting names -- no wonder a boy was fascinated by plants.

By Christopher Andreae

from the April 4, 2007 edition

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As long ago as I can remember, the tennis court in front of my childhood home had been turned into a chicken run – scratched up, pitted, dusty, and tufty. I was born during World War II, so I never saw tennis played on it – such frippery belonged to prewar elegance. The game I loved, instead, was helping to collect the eggs – cozy-warm under the down of raucous hens indignant at the invasion of their private nesting boxes.

I think it must also have been the war that persuaded my dad to turn the ground behind our house into a practical garden. I have no idea what it had been like before, but afterward there were currant bushes, raspberry canes, and, I assume, potatoes and lots of other vegetables, as well as gooseberry bushes (eating ripe, dark-red, hairy gooseberries, honey sweet, was to be a childhood delight).

Nearby were long glasshouses and close to the steps up to our back door, a large black shed that was always referred to as "the incubator house," in memory of a chicken­-hatching venture once attempted in it.

Once the war was over, this back garden – about two acres – didn't return to its past. Instead it became a commercial concern. Flowers – dahlias, chrysanthemums, and sweet peas – were grown in rows to supply the florist trade. To my eyes, these serried ranks – every color of the rainbow except blue – were glorious.

They must have formed my first appreciation of color. If "the child is father to the man," then this man's paternal child swam visually in an ordered ocean of color well before he learned to swim in water. And all that color was directly associated with flowers.

I suspect that my father chose these sorts of flowers because of his affection for them quite as much as for their saleability.

Some of the dahlias were much larger than I was. It was these giants that wowed me most – great floppy white blooms like absurd wedding hats, raggy confections of clear yellow, maroon extravagancies, and piebald efforts of mixed purple and white splotches.

These floriferous monsters gave me a special sense of pride. I thought my father was very clever to grow them.

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