Late yesterday afternoon, as the November sun was sliding into bed and the tall oaks glimmered like red embers in the waning light, I was outside digging holes in my yard. You might ask why I’d be out there in the gloaming, making like a gopher as the air grew chilly and the sky turned to indigo. And here’s my answer: I was planting bulbs. Not light bulbs, which might have made more sense in the deepening gloom of a premature dusk. No, I was making the ground safe for dozens of embryonic daffodils, tulips, hyacinths, irises and lilies, which I hoped might poke their heads above the ground next spring.

This was my first effort at outdoor gardening after years of mild success as a casual nurturer of houseplants. I hadn’t taken much of an interest in gardening until now, possibly because I hadn’t owned an actual house with a garden until now. Two decades as an apartment dweller had isolated me from the soil. I had found it difficult to get excited about flowers and other forms of vegetative life; as I saw it, gardening was better suited to elderly English ladies with sun-bonnets. I dismissed it as a bland and undemanding pastime for my upcoming golden years, when my own mind would be vegetating and I’d have more in common with my green-leafed companions. Now that I owned a house, though, I suddenly felt compelled to tend a garden. It could be that my mind was finally going to seed, but it’s more likely that I was hearing the ancient call of the soil. Who, given the opportunity, wouldn’t stir at the prospect of creating the kinds of floral oases we see on our walks and travels, with towering spikes of pink, purple and blue blossoms growing in casual rustic abundance? A well-designed garden is a fragrant work of art.

We had inherited a mature and picturesque garden from the previous owner, but it ran too heavily toward nondescript foliage plants and tall grasses that seemed to produce some sort of inedible grain. What this garden wanted was an infusion of spring bulbs. During our first tours of the house last April, I noticed a skimpiness about the daffodils, a tenuousness of tulips. I spied sickly groups of two or three flowers where there should have been robust colonies. Now I’d plant those colonies and watch them prosper.

Of course, first I had to learn HOW to plant them. (I figured that if little elderly English ladies in sun-bonnets could do it, how hard could it be?) My father had been an avid gardener, but I rarely watched him in the trenches and, as a result, knew nothing except that if you want daffodils and tulips, you first need bulbs.

I stopped at the local book emporium and carefully selected two guides for gardeners -- one full of step-by-step instructions (a novice always likes to see things divided into steps), and the other brimming with encyclopedic profiles on hundreds of garden-variety flowers. Based on the information gleaned from these sources, I paid a visit to a few nurseries and collected a color-coordinated assemblage of future flowers in bulbous form. Then I outfitted myself with the necessary tools and supplies, including gardener’s gloves, a pointy bulb-planting trowel, a box of botanically correct organic fertilizer and a hefty sack of peat moss.

I drew a miniature map of the garden and plotted the locations of the various bulbs. I reviewed the essential bulb-planting steps. Finally I commenced to dig. To create a suitable bed for the deep-purple Queen-of-Night tulips, I excavated a hole about ten inches down and several feet across. Along with shoveled mounds of earth, I was digging up rocks, roots of dormant plants whose identities would remain unknown, little shards of antique pottery (this was Philadelphia, after all) and -- horror of horrors -- several hibernating bulbs that had been planted there by the previous owner. Some of them I inadvertently murdered with an unfortunate hack of the shovel; I examined their little sliced carcasses with sorrow and apologies before tossing them into the trash. Others were fortunate enough to be heaved whole onto the soil heap. (I saved them for future burial elsewhere in the garden.)

Now that I had created a fairly level and reasonably rock-free bed for the new bulbs, I scooped handfuls of peat moss onto the naked earth, sprinkled some fertilizer into the mixture and finally positioned the bulbs in place -- carefully pointing their little heads so that they might grow up toward the surface instead of down toward China. Then I had to refill the hole, sprinkle in some more peat moss, tamp the soil and cover it with mulch. (I learned that plants, unlike humans, like to be surrounded by their decaying brethren.) And all that was just for the Queen-of-Night tulips. I had to repeat the same procedure, with variations of depth and spacing, for the Orange Emperor tulips, the William and Mary tulips, two varieties of daffodils, two clumps of miniature irises, tiger lilies, crocuses, snowdrops and muscari, a.k.a. grape hyacinths.

This was downright hard labor, comparable to shoveling snow, doing deep knee-bends and performing a chemistry experiment at the same time. I wondered how all those little elderly English ladies with the sun-bonnets do it. Do they know something I don’t know? Do they have the raw muscle-power to heave great mounds of soil out of the ground? Maybe they hire gardeners do the dirty work while they sip their Earl Grey tea. But I suspect that the love of gardening gives them powers beyond those of mortal Englishwomen. I’ve concluded that gardening is not for sissies, and the whole ritual has won my new-found respect. This is no pastime for abstract intellectuals whose heads are divorced from their hands. Gardening is like sex: you have to get surprisingly down-and-dirty in a way that forces you to shed your romantic and ethereal preconceptions. You actually begin to ENJOY getting down-and-dirty. And you grow because of it. Of course, it would be nice if some actual flowers would grow, too. But I’ll have to wait another four months to find out.

Say it ain't so, Big Mac! It's unfortunate enough that Mark McGwire had his Herculean home run record toppled after just three seasons; now the mighty slugger has announced his retirement due to a chronically uncooperative, injury-riddled body. He reached his peak at 35 and is hanging up his spikes at 38, just as player representatives are discussing the possibility of YET ANOTHER baseball strike. Will the National Pastime ever recover?