My upper body can’t shovel another crumb of dirt. I tried to clean up the rest of the mulch today and my left shoulder pretty much said, No, No more of that. I put the pitchfork and wheelbarrow away.

I’m curious what the gardens look like of people who actually know what they’re doing. There’s a horticulture garden on the Virginia Tech campus, just a couple miles away from our house. I have a Fitbit again, and after four days of it gushing how great I am with all the gardening exercise, I couldn’t stand to have a day without it buzzing to tell me I’ve broken yet another record. So I grabbed my camera and went for a walk.

The cherries and Bradford pears are blooming, so there are soft pink and white petals everywhere. The light was a little flat today and I didn’t get great photos of them along the way to the horticulture garden. But once I arrived, everything I wanted to photograph was close to the ground and didn’t require shooting the sky, and all the flowers are adorable, and I felt like I was in a fairy forest.