I've been leafing through a certain Virginia bulb catalog for years, window shopping for an extravagant show of tulips and daffodils (just looking, because so many tulips and Narcissus species do not prosper here). I don't know how I overlooked it all these years, but Brent and Becky's Bulbs also ships bouquets made from its bulb crop.

EVANS CAGLAGE/DMN

THE BIG GESTURE: Get fresh-cut flowers straight from the farm for Mother's Day.

From about March 15 to October 15, the staff cuts a pretty bouquet from the family-owned company's organic fields, boxes it and ships it overnight to you. What you receive is a surprise; you cannot specify certain flowers or certain colors. You get what's blooming on any given day.

When it's early spring in the Tidewater area of Virginia, expect to receive daffodils with yellow, pink and orange cups; white-belled snowflakes and a few flashy tulips. As the season progresses, they'll cut alliums, lilies and crocosmias. At the end of the blooming season, maybe you'd get dahlias and glads.

The bouquet appeals to me because it's a chance to enjoy some of the flowers I can't grow in North Texas or for which I don't have room. I long for those coral-cupped daffodils such as 'Chromacolor' and 'Decoy'. Or those with frilled cups like the yellow and tangerine 'Modern Art' and the white and coral 'Precocious'.

I was taken enough with the idea that I ordered a bouquet for myself, a tonic for a gardener's hands ripped by rose thorns and a back sore from pulling weeds.

The flowers arrived bundled by variety, 10 stems to a bundle. They were housed in a heavy cardboard box, and the bouquet was lashed to the box with plastic straps to keep the fragile flower heads from getting bruised. Surprisingly, the stems were not inserted into individual water picks like florists use, but the flowers were fresh and crisp, as if they had just been brought in from the garden.

There were 60 Narcissus flowers in cheerful shades of yellow, orange, salmon, ivory, pale pink and coral. Not only were they exotic – to a gardener who grows paperwhites and heirloom species that are only yellow and white – but their combined perfume was sweet and powerful. The sight of them banished the gray remnants of this unpredictable spring for a week.

The six tulips included were different varieties. Some flattened their petals wide in the warmth of the sunny room, a couple splayed their striped petals, others nodded their folded heads in graceful gestures. No flower-arranging artifice was needed; a simple glass vase was the perfect container. Don't forget that narcissus, daffodils and jonquils exude a sap that can be deadly to other cut flowers. To minimize this effect, let the Narcissus species sit in water for 24 hours, refill the vase with fresh water and add your other flowers to the bouquet.

So, I'm thinking that if a person were considering how to acknowledge Mother's Day – somebody's son, for instance – a surprise delivery of an armload of sweetly fragrant flowers a couple of days before May 11 would be met with delight. If that son's mother were a fool for flowers, that is.

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