"Do the hostas know about this?" the spousal unit asked in mock indignation.

Spring is in the air. It doesn't look like it, but I can feel it. Each day is a tiny bit longer, each day the sun gets a tiny bit warmer.

The snow in front of the porch is so high this year I can just barely peer out the kitchen window. If we hadn't had a few unseasonably warm days with rain this winter, it feels as if the snow would be up to the porch eaves by now.

Yet I still feel spring in my bones.

Part of me is just frantic to roll up my sleeves and get out there and grow something. Anything. Part of me is grateful that I get the winter lull to step back, regroup, get some perspective.

It's probably a good thing that all the plant porn catalogues stream in during the time of year when our budget is tightest. By the time we uncinch our belts in May, I've had a lot of time to speculate, research, winnow and decide. It's saved me from a lot of regrettable impulse purchases.

For the first time ever, thanks to the disappearance of the wood shed, I'm going to have the rarest of rarities on this property, � a flower bed that gets sunshine all day long. I can't begin to explain how giddy this makes me, how infinite the possibilities seem.

There is a fabulous gardening show called Recreating Eden that spotlights wondrous gardens all over the world and the gardeners behind them. Some are big, hideously expensive, only possible for the most wealthy. Most of them, though, are the work of obsessed cuckoo, uh, committed gardeners like, well, me. The spousal unit claims I should never be allowed to watch it because almost every episode throws me into a landscaping tizzy.

The show is Canadian, so there's lots of Canuckistani goodness in it, including the episode I saw the other night about Neepawa's Lily King.

Here is a man who lives in the same stupidly cold climate I do, also enduring the travails of Zone 3, and he grows over 60 acres of lilies. To support his habit, he has a lily business and when I saw the size of the bulbs he ships, I almost swooned. They are about three times the size of what I can buy here, which means they'd bloom beyond all reason.

I gots to have me some of those lilies.

Imagine driving up to our home through the heavily shaded � mile wooded canopy of our road, bursting into the sunshine of our home's clearing, to be dazzled by a huge swath of lilies emerging from the colourful foam of a bed of nasturtiums. Imagine.

Ah, well, a woman can daydream. Daydreaming costs absolutely nothing.

Lilies aren't cheap. The great news is that he offers some killer specials, if I want to buy ten of his less expensive bulbs. I would prefer to buy just three of this and three of that, but it would bust my tiny gardening piggy bank to go that route. I've been talking to gardening friends in the hopes that we could pool our purchases into one order, buy ten of something and take five each. I do have one friend who's interested, so all is not lost.

Huzzah.

This week I will obsessively comb that catalogue and winnow my choices down to five or six kinds that interest me, and hope that I intersect with my friend on three or four of them.

Technically, I'm not cheating on my beloved hostas. I mean, after all, they're not a plant that can tolerate full sunlight very well. I'm just, uh, meeting new plants that, uh, fit my new requirements.

That said, there's no need to mention this to the hostas, right?

--Marn