One of Carol's bookkeeping clients was Old House Gardens. This company was started by a master gardener/historian who loved the out-of-fashion bulbs. He scavenged plants from old farmhouses with "that flower great Grammy loved what she planted behind the barn", historic gardens, and overseas dealers.

He amassed a fine collection of rare and unusual bulbs, including the last of the variants that caused the Tulip Mania in the 1500s.

He was less adept at growing a business, and that's where Carol came into the picture.

Between being her father's daughter (her dad ran Sears in Spain for many years), and earning her own MBA, Carol largely took over and made him do things like get the spring catalog out before mid-summer.

She loved flowers, so she bought bulbs, of course.

The garden at our old house was her pride and joy, with a large number of unusual varieties.

She planted some fancy rose-colored day-lilies between our mailbox and the lilac hedge.

The lilac hedge was one of the varieties of lilac that sends up shoots and spreads. I like lilacs, so this was fine with me, but once in a while it needed to be thinned.

It came time to thin the hedge while our new house was being built, so I transplanted some of the foot-tall sprouts to my new yard.

Well, not to the yard. The workers were traipsing back and forth across what would become my front yard on an hourly basis.

So I planted the lilacs-and a small chunk of day-lily that was embracing the lilac sprout-in the woods where the workers weren't going.

The plan was I'd re-plant it to a better location "soon".

Yeah, that "soon". The one we keep in the junk drawer under the old phone book.

"Soon" finally arrived last year. I finally moved the sickly lilac to a sunnier spot in my yards.

The lilac approved of this, and after a summer of suffering and a winter of discontent, it blossomed this year.

To my surprise, the hitch-hiking day-lily survived two unintentional transplantings and also bloomed this year.

Carol would have been happy.