The smaller of the two traffic-island gardens near my apartment is worked by an eccentric gardener. It's not nearly as impressive as the bigger one -- where the daffodil-wave was -- but I enjoy it because I get the feeling the gardener, whom I've never met, gardens the way I do: with more enthusiasm than either experience or sense. In the front of the patch he planted lavender, which has spread every year as lavender will and is right now blooming like mad. In the sun it smells glorious. Next to it two summers ago he put a small cactus, a pear cactus, I believe. It seemed content, if not excited, to be where it was until the first frost, when it flattened out as though it had sprung a big fast leak. So much for cactus in New York, says I to myself. But that spring it came back, a little tentatively, I thought, but in the end all the flat segments filled out and it stood up looking pretty good. (Apparently my analogy wasn't too far off: what a cactus does when it gets cold is release all its water so its insides don't freeze, which is why it flattens out. Then it waits until it's warm enough that it's safe to take on water again.) This year it's even happier than last: it's blooming. Bright yellow cactus flowers next to a lavender bush on a Manhattan traffic island. What will they think of next?