It started with roots — native plants, to be exact. Clara was leading a session on Virginia wildflower restoration at the Master Gardeners program in Charlottesville. James had come for a client project, with a notebook and zero expectations.

He asked to see her garden three weeks later. She said yes mostly out of professional curiosity. But the garden turned into coffee, coffee into dinner, and dinner into three years of building a life together — a life that now includes a terrier named Fern and a backyard that James helped design and Clara refuses to stop planting things in.

He proposed on the first day of spring, in that garden, among the things she'd grown.