This has been our arrangement ever since we first moved into a place with a plot of ground bigger than a matchbook. It begins sometime in April, this vernal song-and-dance that we play out each year like it’s the first time we ever did it.

"Wow," she says on a morning when the temperature hovers somewhere above freezing, "the yard is in a mess. Look at all those broken branches. And can you believe that weeds are already starting to pop up among the daffodils? That means it’s time to start digging up for the spring planting!"

"Huh?" I respond invariably.

She, sooner or later, gives up hinting that I should actually go out there and work in this kind of weather. I mean, if it’s chilly, rainy and windy, I have to be indoors reading and writing on the computer. If it’s warm, sunny and pleasant, I have to be outdoors on the deck reading and writing in a notebook. That bending over in the flower beds is not what my doctor recommends. Well, he said "exercise," not "break your back and make every muscle in your body ache for days just so you can have a few flowers blooming in the back of the house where nobody ever looks."

It’s not as one-sided as it sounds. I do some heavy thinking and directing. "You shouldn’t plant those bulbs so deep, it says here in the seed catalog," I will shout from my vantage point on the front stoop. "And it’s not such a good idea to mix the colors up too much."

In truth, she doesn’t need a whole lot of guidance anymore. I’ve taught her just about everything I know about plants and gardening. That task was pretty much completed the first year we were married.

Now, some 30 years later, I have to keep one step ahead of her by consulting various new publications on how to landscape correctly, what plants grow best in this climate and other horticultural knowledge. I’ve even learned to grab the seed catalogs first before she has a chance to read over them so that I might stun her with my expertise.

"Well, do you know why the clematis didn’t bloom last summer?" I ask rhetorically, trying to avoid any hint of arrogance in my voice. "The plants had too much sun on their roots and not enough on their vines!"

My ploy -- and everyone, including my wife, has figured this out by now -- is to seem like an expert so I don’t have to participate in real physical labor. "I don’t know much about horticulture," I protest to anyone who will listen. "BUT I certainly can tell a Tourenia Fournieri from a Polianthes tuberosa. And, like everyone, I know that root cuttings should be placed straight upward and not slanted to the side in an area with nitrogen-rich soil."

That’s stuff I just looked up in the Reader’s Digest Treasury of Gardening. But who would guess when I use that casual tone of voice, making it sound like something I just dredged up from my vast botanical mental storehouse. You don’t have to credit your sources when you’re in an informal conversational situation. Do you?

In recent years, in a state of what I like to refer to as "semi-retirement," I’ve even started to do a little bit of the heavy work, like pulling around a trash barrel on a wagon to pick up some yard debris and chopping ungainly branches from some of the trees. Fortunately, we have a yard man who does the mowing and trimming and anything else that’s really difficult.

Even with all this ritual and subterfuge, the fact is I love springtime and all its glorious manifestations. I can even stand the smell of chicken manure mixed with the perfume of the lilacs and I will pull up the occasional dandelion so I can enjoy the rich green of its leaves and flaming yellow of its bloom. Spade in hand, I direct my feet to the sunny side of the least crowded flower bed.

I dig it; I really dig it.