One of the joys of the spring garden is surprise. Where did these ultra-fluffy, double pink columbine come from? Not only don’t I remember buying them, I don’t remember even knowing they existed. Could they have arrived as seeds embedded in bird droppings? Such an ignoble origin. Could there be a Johnny Columbineseed at large in Ann Arbor, spiriting unusual flowers into unsuspecting gardens under cover of night?

Then over here, how did one tiny patch of forget-me-nots take over the entire flowerbed, even crowding out weeds? A blue haze under the fading spikes of daffodil leaves, it manages to be really in your face despite such tiny petals. It should be called I-dare-you-to-forget-mes.

Moving around to the back yard, a flower pot that once held cosmos has come up with a crop of these little purple flowers, small enough to be violets but somehow I wasn’t convinced. Pansies were in the pot next to it last year. My garden books say four petals up and one down makes it a pansy, two petals up and three down is a violet. Two up, one down, and two sticking out to the side? Panselets?

And then there’s the asparagus patch. I’ve seen it every year since we moved into this house, but it still makes me laugh to see the way it comes up out of the ground, looking for all the world like someone has snuck out to the garden and stood a bunch of asparagus spears upright in the dirt as a practical joke. But no, they’re growing right out of the ground. The second joy of the spring garden: that dirt, water, and sunlight turn into food and beauty, whether the way we expected or not.