Daffodils

One of the delights of gardening is gathering a basketful of fresh-cut flowers to fill the house with fragrance and eye-catching color. A well-planned landscape can yield ample flowers for enjoyment indoors as well as outdoors, say garden professionals. "We've noticed just in the last year that an increasing number of Orange County residents are turning away from the once-popular quick and easy, low-maintenance landscape designs.

When Debra Prinzing talks about "Slow Flowers," the title of her new book, what's most striking is the extent to which concepts that sound so familiar and so logical also can seem so foreign. After all, how many times have we picked up flowers at Trader Joe's without asking ourselves: Are the blooms in season? Were they grown locally? Who produced them or where did they came from? You might find those kinds of sourcing questions answered on menus but rarely on store-bought bouquets. Prinzing will be in Los Angeles on Wednesday to talk about the ideas driving the book, which is subtitled "Four Seasons of Locally Grown Bouquets From the Garden, Meadow and Farm" [$16.95, St. Lynn's Press ]

The Piano Teacher: The True Story of a Psychotic Killer by Robert K. Tanenbaum & Peter S. Greenberg (New American Library: $17.50; 336 pages) A story just like this one is bound to turn up on the late news one day this week or next. You'll see the seedy apartment house, watch the stretcher shoved into the police van, and hear the neighbors repeat the familiar litany--they can't believe it because the killer seemed such a mild, quiet guy.

Question: We back on to a wildlife corridor. Our backyard is landscaped primarily with perennials. We have several bird feeders. All of these factors attract ground squirrels. We built an 8-foot waterfall, and a pair of squirrels immediately decided to make their home under it. We now have about 10 squirrels and they are eating many of the perennials (rudbeckia, coreopsis, cosmos, blanket flowers, etc.). They also eat my annuals such as poppies, sweet peas and nasturtium.

The tedious and unglamorous trench work that must precede the blooming of golden trumpet daffodils in the workplaces of the San Fernando Valley this spring has begun. The daffodil, as one of the first flowers to bloom in spring, has been adopted by the American Cancer Society as its symbol of hope and, in the same vein, as the medium for one of the more charming methods yet devised to hit people up for charity. It's called Daffodil Days.

Virginia Woolf was born 104 years ago this week, on Jan. 25, 1882. This excerpt is from her "A Letter to a Young Poet" in "The Death of the Moth and Other Essays." Copyright 1942 by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Inc.; renewed 1970 by Marjorie T. Parsons, executrix. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

The giant flower that sprouted Wednesday in downtown Los Angeles isn't a reminder that warm weather is here. It's a reminder that the Cold War is not. Sculptor Michael Tansey climbed 30 feet into the air to convert an abandoned air raid siren at Olympic Boulevard and Figueroa Street into a huge yellow daffodil. The exercise wasn't as daffy as it sounds. Officials say that if passersby like the look of the flower, many of the city's 200 other sirens could similarly be turned into works of art.

Pronounce Puyallup? I couldn't even see Puyallup, never mind trying to say it. This was the first day of spring, but the weather was in a snit. Rain began to fall in sheets a nanosecond after I left the Seattle airport, bound for this town about 25 miles south. I came to the Puyallup Valley, known for its daffodil fields, on a quest for spring, for something beautiful and orderly and life-affirming in contrast to world chaos.

My still-dripping garden had "spring" stamped all over it, following one of those recent storms. The day had dawned clear and sunny, and it looked and smelled like spring. Not spring full-blown, but early spring, when the garden is awaking and full of promise. Against a clearing sky, I could see the first roses of the year--droplet-covered blossoms high overhead. I've coaxed this apricot-colored climber into a small eucalyptus. The rose is a 1904 Noisette named 'Crepuscule.'

Plant spring-blooming annuals and bulbs before the first frost arrives so they will be well-rooted. For a wonderful splash of early spring color in your flower beds plant either tulips, daffodils or hyacinth (right). Next, plant blooming annuals over the top of this flower bed. Now you can enjoy the beauty of the blooming annuals, and when the bulbs bloom, you'll have a double decked flower bed.