The Transplanted Gardener: Moving 3,000 Miles to California Opened Up a Whole New World for Joyce Maynard. but It Also Meant Learning a Different Set of Rules

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ONE LOOK at my mother's hands, and you would have known she was a gardener. Living as we did in New Hampshire, the only way she had to indulge her love of growing things from September into May lay in tending our houseplants and starting avocado seeds on toothpick stands in our kitchen window. In March, with the ground still white and the air frigid, my mother scraped back the snow on our flower beds in search of the first brave crocus and hyacinth spears to push through the frozen soil. But come Memorial Day, we'd make our long-anticipated annual pilgrimage to the nursery and fill the backseat of our Buick with that year's crop of annuals--flats of smiling pansies, three colors of marigolds, ageratum, petunias, and my mother's favorite, zinnias.

I loved the day we put the flowers …