I'm sure there's an analogy here somewhere...

About a week ago some beautiful tulips that I planted last fall were looking very promising:

Only a couple of days later:

Wow! Isn’t that just the most amazing thing?!! I did absolutely nothing except dig a hole, give it a bit of fertilizer, and water it (a very little bit). And even what I did do probably didn’t make that big of a difference. The potential for beauty was all stored in that brown bulb I saw last fall.

The bad news is that I got so excited about it that I enthusiastically downloaded too many pictures to my Flickr account – I think maybe I maxed it out until next month – so you’ll have to wait on the other two kinds of bulbs that have come up in the past couple of days.