Flowers keep calling even to a generation that's lost touch with nature – Laura Waddell

I read recently that snowdrops have been known to reappear surprisingly, forgotten plantings from years back flowering unexpectedly after disturbed ground is cleared or worked over.

I like the thought of these delicate flowers, their bent heads among the first gentle, relieving signs of spring, possessing such drive to find their way back to the light.

I’ve always had an affinity with these flowers because when I was five or six, my mother planted an outline of my first name in snowdrop bulbs, pride of place beside the rose bushes in my grandparents’ garden – from which, while out playing, I came to form an opinion that yellow roses smelled the sweetest comparative to the white, red, and pinks, and especially after rainfall. It became difficult to see how the constellation points of small white flowers, not all of which had come to maturity, spelled out the shape of LAURA, but their flowering haphazardly for years afterwards was a nice reminder of what had been there.

Such green inclinations, or the honed ability of my grandparents to identify birds, trees, and plants upon sight and if need be, closer inspection via snipping cheeky cuttings, never really passed down to my generation. Houseplants have not historically fared well under my care, although there’s a little pilea on my kitchen windowsill that just won’t give up, even after the death of its contemporaries.

Right now, as a renter without a garden, having my own green patch seems pretty far off and so I dip into the verdant parks of Glasgow when I feel the need, as the youth say, to ‘touch some grass’. From my window, though, I can see the bare branches of trees that I am excited to see sprouting light, fresh green signs of life again.

Last week, while under the regime of a temporary sleeping configuration, I became entranced with a small bunch of supermarket blooms in a ceramic vase that, in order to close the blinds each day, I had to move off the windowsill. But I couldn’t resist moving them back into the light each day, seeing how their colour changed backlit by increasingly bluer skies or the late-afternoon golden hour.

In light of this, I received a present for Valentine’s day: a Lego orchid. Finally, a plant I can’t kill.