I did not inherit my mother’s unerring green thumb or her interest in exotic flowers. In my own yard, I plant flowers to feed the pollinators and provide habitat for wildlife, not to please the human eye, and my garden includes a scruffy mix of flowers that can be found growing wild along any roadside in Tennessee. (If you’d like to turn your own little postage stamp of native soil into a conservation effort, Douglas W. Tallamy’s new book, “Nature’s Best Hope,” is a great place to begin.) The seeds that I take great pains to cultivate, cold-stratifying in the refrigerator and starting under grow lights to get the earliest possible jump on the growing season, are flowers that my mother would have pulled out of her perennial border without a thought. Many are actually designated as weeds by their common, if not scientific, names: milkweed, Joe Pye weed, pokeweed.

But like my mother before me, I spend hours with seed catalogs and field guides, especially in winter. Long before it’s time to plant, it’s time to plan the planting, and planning is one of gardening’s real pleasures. “After all,” Katharine S. White notes in “Onward and Upward in the Garden,” a collection of her legendary New Yorker columns, “winter reading and winter daydreams of what might be — the gardens of the mind — are as rewarding a part of gardening as the partial successes of a good summer of bloom.” And field guides, with their glossy photos of weedy wildflowers, offer a promise: Spring is coming.

“Wildflowers of Tennessee, the Ohio Valley, and the Southern Appalachians,” the official field guide of the Tennessee Native Plant Society, is my “What Flower Is That?” I am no more a botanist than my mother was, but I am learning the difference between tickweed and tickseed, between breadroot and snakeroot, and I take as much pleasure from learning those homely names as Mom must have taken from learning that the morning glories she planted on our lamppost came to her by way of Africa. Her book taught her the flower’s botanical name. My books teach me the flower’s botanical name and also that morning glories, like other vines in the bindweed family, can be invasive here in Tennessee.

I feel very lucky to have a small yard to putter in during this lengthy quarantine, and I am spending as much time out there as I can. But state parks in Tennessee are closed now, and the city greenways and urban parks, though open, are often too crowded now for safe passage during a time of social distancing. Some Nashville women reportedly hiked a nearby trail wearing hoop skirts to enforce a safe perimeter, but I would not be caught dead wearing a hoop skirt. So I am missing spring in the woods this year, something I have never done before in my life, and I find myself returning to my flower books for solace, just as though it’s winter again.

Flipping through one book inevitably poses a question that can be answered by another, book after book, like a garden path meandering through dappled shade to a sunny meadow and then back to the dark tree line. One book leads to another, and memories lead to dreams, just as flowers lead to caterpillars in the real world, just as caterpillars lead to butterflies. With a field guide in my hands for an evening, I’m not in the middle of a pandemic anymore. Without ever stepping out of the house, I’m in the middle of life itself.

Margaret Renkl is a contributing Opinion writer who covers flora, fauna, politics and culture in the American South. She is the author of the book “Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss.”

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