Diana McIntyre swiped a dusty sleeve across her damp fore- head, tucked her trowel back into her tool belt and proudly assessed her day’s work.
Six long garden beds ran the length of the paddock, two with freshly turned soil. In all her years of gardening, these were the patches she was most excited about, planted with tubers for her first commercial dahlia crop.
‘Two down, four to go,’ Diana said, fanning herself with her straw hat and trying to recall the last time they’d experi- enced such a spring heatwave in the western Victorian town of Bridgefield.
It wouldn’t look like much to a visitor. Heck, if she hadn’t spent the day on her knees, with her hands in the dirt, even she wouldn’t be able to tell there were thousands of dollars of dahlias buried in the first two patches.
Pete will be impre . . . Diana pressed a hand to her heart.
She’d lost count of the times it still caught her unawares.
She dusted her hands on her overalls, as much to remove the dirt as to shake off the sudden stab of loss. The mob of corellas that had been watching her all afternoon swooped down and
began picking through the soil. Diana started towards the birds, waving her hat, covering just a few steps before her body reminded her she’d used up her quota of energy for the day.
The gate hinges creaked as she walked from the dahlia paddock into her house garden. Diana snipped a bloom from the flourishing Abraham Darby rose bush, willing the scent to distract her. The last thing she needed was the boys to arrive home from school and find her in tears again.
Fresh starts, she reminded herself, cradling the bloom as she ascended the steps to her weatherboard farmhouse. Starting the flower farm was a step in the right direction, darned if she was going to let grief swallow her now…
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