Tulips & HyacinthsTulips & hyacinths photographed, by Glenn Franco Simmons, in the Valley of Hearts' Delight, also known as the Santa Clara Valley in the San Francisco Bay Area. We planted a lot of daffodils and tulips this year and some hyacinths, but I may have ordered the hyacinths a bit late, as we had to plant them in almost frozen ground. I'll order some next year and see how they do. In Carson City, it's much more difficult to grow flowers than where I grew up and worked most of my life, in the Humboldt and Del Norte region of the North Coast of the real Northern California (San Francisco and the Bay Area are, to us, Central California).

This photo was taken at a country estate with formal gardens at Filoli, about halfway between San Francisco and San Jose. We lived in Cupertino for about nine years after the daily newspaper I co-founded sunk in the Second Great Depression of 2007-08. As President Reagan said, and I'll paraphraise: It's a recession if you have a job, and a depression if you don't. I'll add, it's a great depression if your business goes under