Marigolds are not my favorite flowers, but you'll always find them in my garden.

     A single look at their striking orange-red petals or one smell of their musky scent, and I'm transported back to the 1980s, to Astoria, New York, and my grandmother's apartment. It was a three-story building with a brick facade and a balcony on the front and back of her second-floor unit. The street was short and sloped down to where it ultimately dead-ended at the East River, the Tri-Borough bridge in view. Like so much of Queens, it was an eclectic street, made up of old Victorians on one side and apartments on the other, with large high rises looming at the top of the street.

     But her flower garden . . . those flowers! A bright and colorful spot in a sea of gray and brown, the sidewalks surrounding it washed often. The garden just gleamed. It was in front of that flower garden that I sometimes set up a lemonade stand with my grandpa, selling lemonade and snacks to everyone taking a shortcut to the Astoria city pool.

     She planted everything from seed, and so was how I first learned to garden. She planted so many flowers - a rainbow of every color, variety, and size. As for planting, I mostly remember the marigold seeds, a big sack of them in the back of the garage. After we prepared the holes, she'd fill her wrinkled hand and my smooth one with the black-gray seeds, and she'd show me how to not only plant them but also care for them while they germinated. I visited her most weekends, so week after week after planting, I anxiously awaited the first sprouts. Marigolds were constants in her garden and the ones we seemed to plant most often, all summer long.

     In my own yard now, I plant lots of things, almost always from seedlings or rhizomes. But I always have packs of marigold seeds on hand, and I always plant a few here and there in the various flowerbeds at season's start.

     They never bloomed this year, so I figured it was just was one of those years. Imagine my surprise last week when I was pulling out of my driveway and, from the corner of my eye, I saw the unexpected but familiar burst of orange and deep red.