It is pouring with rain and a fierce wind is battering my woodpile. One of the metal lawn chairs has tumbled twenty feet and landed upside down, so it looks like an avant garde sculpture, or it would if the lawn weren't knee-high and shaggy, half wild and half trailer park. . .

Do I care about any of this? I do not. Well, I'd vastly prefer that a tree not blow down on the house or my car. But aside from that I'm pretty oblivious. It's March. The plant and seed catalogs have just arrived and I'm lost in a daydream involving Snow Queen hydrangeas, “Blue Muffin” viburnum, and Nepeta “Walker's Low,” otherwise known as catmint. The fantasy also involves a new planting bed with amended soil — in our landscape that means oyster shell and rock phosphate as well as good compost — and weed cloth around the edges so the darn Bermuda grass stays out, at least for a year or two. Despite my generally practical nature, I'm seeing in my mind's eye the newly dug-in shrubs immediately growing to full size, white hydrangea blossoms nodding sleepily at the ends of their arched stems, the viburnum's deep blue berries attracting all manner of songbirds. You get the idea.

For the moment, we won't go into the realities of July's baking heat nor when those berries ripen, which is probably not while the hydrangeas are flowering. In gardening daydreams, everything is possible and someone else has always figured out the soil's Ph and dug the planting holes.

These catalogs are designed to sell us a fantasy, and they do their work well. This photo here, of Passiflora “Sherry” for instance, spilling out of its frame, really might as well be a 23-year-old with his shirt off, smiling at us over a bronzed shoulder. And the copy! Listen to this: “'Sherry' is the first of the new Darkhorse series of Passionflower hybrids. Its blooms are an intense ruby red with black and white speckled filaments, a breathtaking sight climbing a trellis.” The mind turns smoothly to other things in life that turn intense ruby red and how nimbly a 23-year-old could climb a trellis conveniently located, say, under your bedroom window. Breathtaking, indeed. . . Dear Reader, I will leave the speckled filaments to your agile imagination.

Page after page of this kind of seduction and it's no wonder we haul out our wallets to purchase Phlox “Purple Kiss” and “Gypsy Love,” Hemerocallis “Black Stockings” (which looks like a daylily to me), Coreopsis “Autumn Blush,” and Delphinium “Wishful Thinking!” All by itself, spring makes you want to tear off your clothes and join the great fertility dance. Add soft gardening porn to the mix and who knows what will happen?

This morning's rain, however, has just turned to heavy snow. I'd better get my boots on, find a broom, and go thump the branches of my fruit trees so they don't break off. The brave daffodils are bowing white heads now, and the woodpile suddenly looks too small to last the rest of the winter.

Sigh. Early March. No 23-year-olds in sight.